Countrywide Farmers in trouble. Not seen posted before. Apologies if I’ve missed.
No clue on wages etc there but always thought the units looked smart.
I thought they just bought a lot of cranes and semi lows as in a Phoenix ?
mrginge:
No clue on wages etc there but always thought the units looked smart.
They run some nice kit…IIRC some painted up with farming/rural scenes.
But they seemed to do a lot, but not all of it very well. When your core business is everything from garden centres to farm supplies and fuel distribution it must be difficult to keep on top of it all.
I recall buying a rack of what looked like dead Acers (Japanese Maples) from the Gloucester branch for 50p each…no one had watered them.
A bit of TLC later, they had all recovered bar one…and were worth about £15 each at garden centre prices. I did suggest to my then wife that we start a business called Acers High and sell them off, but no, she wanted them planted.
mrginge:
No clue on wages etc there but always thought the units looked smart.
I might be wrong, but did`nt they have owner drivers in their colours, hence the above average kit ?
■■■■ sure they advertised years ago for o/d`s…
GasGas:
mrginge:
No clue on wages etc there but always thought the units looked smart.They run some nice kit…IIRC some painted up with farming/rural scenes.
But they seemed to do a lot, but not all of it very well. When your core business is everything from garden centres to farm supplies and fuel distribution it must be difficult to keep on top of it all.
I recall buying a rack of what looked like dead Acers (Japanese Maples) from the Gloucester branch for 50p each…no one had watered them.
A bit of TLC later, they had all recovered bar one…and were worth about £15 each at garden centre prices. I did suggest to my then wife that we start a business called Acers High and sell them off, but no, she wanted them planted.
All the “show ponies” have gone now. The current fleet, whilst tidy enough, is very “plain Jane” compared to what it was, I suspect because it’s leased rather than owned One of our bulk delivery contractors (Evans Bros. of Llandybie) has a couple of the old ones, the Two Ronnies and the farming scenes ones.
There’s not a lot left of Countrywide to be honest; they closed down their rented stores a few years ago, virtually overnight in some cases with a fire sale which caused massive queues and did a helluva lot of damage to smaller independents in the horse tack sector, and sold their bulk direct farm supplies off; our lot bought that which was pretty academic really because we also made the cake in the first place so it was just cutting out the middle man. The fuel side was never going to compete with Calor and the longer-established independent merchants, and to be honest they were expensive; I went to our local one a few years ago for a sledge hammer and a log splitter, same items at our local indie were £20 cheaper.
Fur coat and no knickers is the general opinion of Countrywide in the farming world; tried to do everything and ended up doing nothing.
Feel for their drivers though, they are by and large a good bunch of lads who looked after those trucks really well. But I won’t miss delivering to Defford.
You’ll still see a few 8-wheel bulk blowers and a few curtainsiders about in the old Countrywide livery, but they’re all ForFarmers now and have been for over two years, just the old stuff which hadn’t got long enough on their leases to justify the cost of a re-paint.