Last night’s Dispatches, The Secrets of Sports Direct (Channel 4), delved into the discount chain that turned the football into a disposable commodity: at £3 each you can kick one into next door’s garden all day. The first time your neighbour refuses to throw it back promptly, go buy two more and kick them over. Then four. He’ll move house in the end.
Along with cheap trainers, Sports Direct is also known for its signature giant mugs, which most other retailers call customers. We tend to think we’re on to them – we’ve all cottoned on to the fact that the massive closing down sale they’ve been having for the last 15 years isn’t necessarily a sign of hard times. That doesn’t make the sly retailing OK, but it also doesn’t stop people going in when they want a 10-pair pack of socks for £5.
Although you would only really be shocked by Harry Wallop’s investigation if you’d never set foot in Sports Direct, it’s satisfying to have such practices laid bare and explained. For the record: those closing down signs don’t mean the company is going out of business. It may not even mean the outlet is closing; it’s probably being refurbished, or moving to bigger premises round the corner, like the one in Lincoln the programme visited. This hardly matters, since the “sale” prices were the same as the discounts in any other outlet. Staff didn’t exactly conceal this from customers. “It is a bit misleading, I think, but yeah,” said one.
Sports Direct’s statement in response to this revelation was a weaselly masterpiece: “There was what we would refer to as a closing down promotion advertised at this store. It is correct that a different store then opened.”
I like to think of myself as, if not a wise consumer, at least a cynical one, but a few things surprised me. Sports Direct actually owns a lot of sporting brands – including Slazenger, Donnay, Everlast, Dunlop and Karrimor – so they can slap those logos on anything they like. I’ve long suspected their swingeing discounts were an exaggeration, but according to one former worker some goods arrive direct from the factory with the faux-hand-lettered price-slash labels already stuck on. And the crossed-out higher price on those labels – the so-called “REF” price – is meaningless. It’s neither the recommended retail price, nor the manufacturer’s recommended price.
And yet, and yet. Even if people are being misled into thinking the cheap tracksuit bottoms they’re buying were at some point more expensive elsewhere, they’re still incredibly cheap. More important is the question of why.
Part of the answer is in the company’s East Midlands HQ, where “pickers” fulfil online orders while a tannoy names and shames – in English and Polish – employees who aren’t working fast enough. Only an estimated 300 of Sports Direct’s 5,000-plus workforce are employees as such, the rest are on zero-hours contracts. Meanwhile, billionaire owner Mike Ashley (“the 22nd wealthiest person in the UK”) has bought Newcastle United and turned the club and its ground into his personal advertising hoarding. There’s something in Sports Direct’s massive closing down success story rise that demeans us all. Maybe it’s time we asked for our ball back.
The title Himmler: The Decent One (BBC4) is certainly eye-catching. As examples of faint praise go, “the nice guy of the Nazi high command” takes some beating. But it turns out that “decent” was actually a bit of deluded self-assessment on the part of the SS Commander. The documentary was based on letters, diaries, documents and photos found at Heinrich Himmler’s home, when it was raided by the US Army in 1945, and which have only recently come to light.
It made for an impressionistic and chilling portrait. “People don’t like me,” wrote Himmler, when he failed to make it into some weird student fraternity. As a young man, he comes across as weak (“Sick. Fainted again this morning”), with a dangerous need for validation (“You start to think if only there was a war again. If only I could put my life on the line”). Alongside horrifying comments about sleeping well despite being up to his eyeballs in death squad bureaucracy, there are glimpses of mundane family life tainted by association with the regime. His daughter’s diary recounted a teacher looking the other way as she cheated on a test, and of being given a pony for her birthday by a friend. “Papa won’t let me keep it,” she wrote, “because Elke’s parents want to benefit from our friendship.” At several points, Himmler’s Pooterish pronouncements on decency were contrasted with grisly footage of the SS at work. As a title, Himmler: Complete Bastard would have worked fine.
