Dispatches: The Secrets of Sports Direct, Channel 4, Monday at 8pm
The secrets of Sports Direct are, well, not really secrets at all.
It does what all good businesses do; keeping the customers happy and the costs low.
Mike Ashley may not win the media friendly chief executive of the year award, but he is exceptional at these key requirements of a profitable business.
Dispatches presenter Harry Wallop was shocked, shocked I tell you, that the discounts advertised in Sports Direct were not really discounts at all.
In fact most of the goods come in from their Asian manufacturers with the discount prices already printed on the packaging.
Ashley may be breaching some of the selling regulations, but surely there isn’t a consumer out there who believes sale prices any more.
For instance, do we think that bottle of wine in the supermarket with the reduced sticker is really a bargain? What about the furniture store with the 20 per cent more off the already 50 per cent sale price sticker?
Of course we don’t. Trading standards, or whichever government body is responsible for this, gave up a long time ago and now most consumers are sensible enough just to look at the price and decide whether it is value for money.
For the most part Sports Direct does provide good value and therefore it’s a success.
The other brilliant decision of Ashley was to buy jaded brands – Slazenger, Dunlop, Karrimor, Everlast – on the cheap and produce Sports Direct own branded kit under their labels.
But he’s also invested in the brands – Dunlop sponsors our own former Open champion, Darren Clarke.
And he can sell two footballs for £5 because the business is brutal on its costs.
Dispatches sent an uncover worker to the Sports Direct headquarters where the thousands of staff, many foreign, are on zero hour contracts and working under a strict regime.
Zero hour contracts are a nasty development of the recession which should be outlawed, but that’s a matter for government not for Mike Ashley to decide he’ll operate at a disadvantage to his competitors.
And at the headquarters pickers – workers who fill internet orders – are required to gather orders at a certain rate an hour or be disciplined, while food and toilet breaks are strictly monitored.
Sure, it’s tough, but retail is brutal and if Ashley loses control of his costs or the offering to his customers he’s tomorrow’s Tesco and Dispatches will be making a programme about where it all went wrong.
Fair enough, this Dispatches was a close inspection of an entrepreneur who plays on the edge, but surely Mike Ashley deserves some credit for building a business of 500 stores, 24,000 employees and an annual turnover of more than £2.7 billion?
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Himmler: The Decent One, BBC 4, Tuesday at 10pm
I couldn’t take my eyes of this intimate portrait of leading Nazi, Heinrich Himmler.
The leader of the SS was profiled through his private correspondence to his family through the passage of the war.
I came across it by chance and only intended to watch briefly, but was drawn in by the brutal simplicity.
There were no experts to deduce personality traits from his letters home, or tell us of his evil hatred of Jews and gypsies.
But you could sense the malevolence with every picture of the SS Reichsfuhrer and his trademark round-rimmed glasses.
Each time I saw him all I could think of was the piles and piles of similar glasses from the victims at Auschwitz.
