DaveWhit. wrote:Congrats to the Phoenix team for sorting out the distribution glitch (at least here in Southend).
Pics so it happened:
You have no idea what it took to get that picture.
First, I went (misguidedly hopefully) to the Little Waitrose, which was closest. They didn't even stock the Beano in their tiny magazine rack, and although I tried the very back, I found nothing.
So off I went to the much bigger Waitrose up on the ex-railway land, a location with which I have become intimately familiar over the last two weeks. I looked at their magazine stand, which seems to get more moribund every time I look at it, but apart from a large number of unsold Beanos, nothing to suggest that the Phoenix had ever come within a hundred paces of the thing.
I turned round and, for the third time in my life and the last two weeks, addressed the assistant at the nearby customer service desk. This time I didn't even bother asking if they knew when the Phoenix was coming in, since it evidently wasn't, so I simply asked where the nearest Waitrose to the one in which I was standing was, excluding the outpost opposite the station. They may have thought this a distinctly odd request, but nevertheless advised me to go to Raynes Park.
Thankfully, due to a previous, unrelated, equally fruitless search for an unfindable product in that general area, I had recently coincidentally discovered the location of this particular monstrous flogging-shed for myself, and so I resolved to walk there immediately (the sort of decision it's easier to make on a Saturday afternoon when you don't have a social life). Getting the bus would undoubtedly have been quicker, but I'm sure the endless concrete footpath by the side of the four-track railway embankment did me the power of good.
As you can probably guess, after having scoured the many aisles of the industrial-scale retail unit for their well-hidden magazine rack, the number of issues of the Phoenix I found was zero. Determined not to give up the search, I went round to the local customer desk and, again, asked where the nearest branch was that wasn't in Raynes Park or Wimbledon. This time, since I wasn't so well known as a nutcase around those parts, I mentioned that I was looking for the Phoenix, a comic supposedly exclusively available in Waitrose, and apparently still pretty damn exclusive even after limiting one's search to branches of Waitrose.
Like her counterpart at Wimbledon, the woman behind the monitor offered to phone round and ask some other branches if they stocked it. Well, I say she 'offered' - in actual fact she went away and got someone else to take her place, presumably because she was incapable of operating the phone for herself. Anyway, woman number 2 wrote down a list of branches local to the immediate vicinity, each taking me further and further away from home, and, since I could not possibly visit all of them before closing time, I requested that she eliminated as many as possible by phone first.
New Malden was closest. She dialled, she held, she waited for several nail-biting minutes, before finally relaying the inevitable 'no'.
Kingston was easily accessible by bus. She dialled some more, she held, she received exactly the same answer.
Surbiton didn't even bother to answer the phone.
That just left Worcester Park. She dialled yet again, she chatted, and then suddenly the local half of the conversation took a noticeable swing for the hopeful. Finally, she put the phone down, smiled, and announced that, yes, Worcester Park had taken delivery of not one, but
three issues of the Phoenix - with the caveat that they hadn't even put them on the shelf yet, so I'd have to speak to a representative of my third welcome desk of the day.
I've never even been to Worcester Park before, and it's fortunate she was able to print off a map. I travelled two stops on the local branch line, I got rather lost on the high street, I realised that the map really wasn't quite as accurate as it might have been, and eventually I stumbled across a narrow turn-off between two shops, which turned out to be the entrance to the Waitrose car park.
And so to the island in the entrance area, which, for lack of any more plausible candidates, I had to assume was the welcome desk. Queueing for some minutes behind an extremely chatty mother and her young child in the trolley, I casually glanced over the barriers... and saw, lurking underneath one corner of the desk, a small pile of cardboard boxes, and, resting on top of one of them, a purple cover bearing a distinctive bird-shaped logo.
The conversation, when it finally started, went something like this:
Me: "Hello, I'm here to pick up a copy of the Phoenix?"
Her: "Do you have the coupon?"
Me: "The... coupon?"
Her: "Yes, you can't get it without the coupon."
Me: "Well, I was just in Raynes Park, and they phoned -"
Her: "Are you talking about the book in the Telegraph?"
Me: "Er... no, I'm talking about that comic behind you."
Her: "Ohh, you must be the young man who phoned earlier!"
Me: "That's right."
Her: "We've only just taken delivery of them, so we haven't put them out yet. Say, which issue did you want? Only I've got three here, and Raynes Park said they didn't know which one you -"
Me: "I'll have them all!"
And so, after a ten pound note changed hands, I finally came into posession of this rarest of prizes.
Bloody hell, and I thought the Dandy had problems...