Diary of a Shopkeeper, 15th September 2024

The Orkney Science Festival packs more into one week than many organisations do in a year. If I didn’t have to turn up to work, I could happily attend ten lectures, films, and exhibitions every day. As It turned out, I was able to combine business and pleasure (again) on Wednesday evening, when I acted as host in The Orkney Theatre for a talk by Edwin J Booth, fifth generation leader of the Booths grocery chain.

The name Booths is likely to produce one of two reactions. For food-lovers from northwest England it’ll induce a swoon of appreciation. The rest of us will assume a vague look and mumble something we once heard about Booths being, ‘the Waitrose of the north.’ Not having spent any time in northwest England, I fall into the second camp. I’ve never been in a Booths store. Come to that, I’ve never been in a Waitrose either. (Anyway, everyone knows that William Shearer’s is the real Waitrose of the north.)

As a small shopkeeper, I’m fanatical about doing my shopping in other independent shops whether I’m at home or travelling. I tend to find better value for money and more interesting local products there, and so avoid big chains as much as possible. It was fascinating, then, to hear Edwin Booth, chair of a group that runs 27 busy stores selling a huge range of goods, speak of his company’s ethos as being, ‘Purpose before Profit.’

Its founder, Edwin Henry Booth, came from a broken family and was raised in extreme poverty. He channelled his trauma into ambition, hard work and self-discipline, building the humble shop he opened in Blackpool in 1847 into a major regional business. His ambition was matched by his morality: from the start he established values in his company that are still important over a century and a half later. What were those values? The contemporary Edwin puts it as follows: ‘to buy the best merchandise he could find to sell in stores whose retailers understood human values and treated customers with respect.’ It sounds like common sense, but with so many big chains prioritising profit over service – anyone remember the horsemeat scandal? – it really isn’t that common.

Booths make a feature of stocking local produce as much as possible, just as many shops here do. That includes using their own product development and marketing departments to help new producers improve and commercialise their kitchen-table recipes. Edwin gave the example of a brilliant but slightly eccentric man who makes the best fish chowder in the northwest. He sells it from a crockpot in the basket on his bike, as he cycles the streets of Blackpool. Solar panels on the back of the bike help keep the soup warm. Booths saw potential in the pedal-powered chowder, and are helping its creator scale up and take his product into their chain of stores.

But Booths also believe in sourcing great food and drink from beyond their area. Edwin himself spent 18 years as wine buyer for the business, crisscrossing Europe in search of good new wines. His favourites remain French classics: Rhône for reds and Burgundy for whites.

I found many parallels between Booths’ history and Kirkness & Gorie’s. Their original shop was opened in Blackpool shortly after the first trainline was laid there. It brought hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers form the newly industrialised towns and cities of northwest England. They all needed fed and watered, and Booths stepped in to supply them. Likewise, when the railway first reached Thurso in the mid-1840s, around the same time steamers connected Orkney to Aberdeen and Leith, it became possible for Orcadian farmers to export cattle in great numbers. Suddenly, after hundreds of years of poverty, we had a way of making some real money. Never mind a gold rush, the mid-nineteenth century was a beef rush in Orkney. New wealth meant new demand for the trappings of success, which was readily supplied by many businesses, some of which are still going strong. W. Hourston, Jewellers, was founded in Albert Street in 1844. The Orcadian published its first edition in 1854. And of course, James and Margaret Kirkness opened their grocer’s shop in Broad Street in 1859.

The Kirknesses sold local foods of all sorts, including fresh fish and vegetables. But they also established themselves as importers of specialist continental goods. Receipt books from the 1860s record them selling not just potatoes, eggs and lobsters, but wine, Port, coffee, macaroni and pesto. Sometimes, as I said in my introduction to Edwin Booth’s talk, K&G advertised itself as an ‘Italian warehouseman’, which seems to have been the equivalent to saying a deli today. Edwin mentioned that his family business had used exactly the same phrase to describe themselves.

So maybe Booths isn’t the Waitrose of the north. Maybe it’s the Kirkness & Gorie of the south.

This diary appeared in The Orcadian on 19th September 2024. A new diary appears weekly. I post them in this blog a few days after each newspaper appearance, with added illustrations, and occasional small corrections or additions.