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Rambling On....
with Vic Southern
Vic Southern talks to The Locksmith Journal about the economy,
online forums, manufacturers and electronic magazines.
»»In my last article, I spoke
about several subjects; Chinese
fakes, business prospects for 2015
and the potential slump in sterling
values should the world perceived
that we had the “wrong” election
result. In fact, sterling did slump
badly three or four weeks before
the May elections but zoomed up
immediately when the result was
known.
Today, sterling stands at a
premium particularly against
the Euro. Many other countries
are seeing their currencies on a
downward slide and those include
China, Australia, New Zealand
and South Africa – for quite a wide
range of reasons.
‘one might think that
business confidence
would drop, but
quite the reverse,
it is increasing’
The effects on our UK economy
are quite mixed; most imported
goods may be cheaper, our exports
decline and inward tourism is
down, as is the employment in
these industries. The plusses and
minuses of those are so complex
that one might think that business
confidence would drop, but quite
the reverse, it is increasing.
A general overview in brief but what does it mean for the
Locksmithing industry?
For the past 20 years, I have heard
from many friends and customers
that there are far too many people
mucking about in the trade, yet still
more people enter it.
What is clear is that as the
population increases there is an
increased demand for every kind
of service although trends change
rapidly. Not only in the autolockmith trade but throughout access control, safes, security locks
and demand for physical door
security in schools, universities,
hospitals and office suites.
Car makers change their type of
keys and type of electronic security
at a bewildering rate. Thieves
are more ingenious and more
persistent, having easy access to
tools to assist them to steal. They
can buy bump keys on Amazon
starting at just over £4 for a “set”
of three to a set of 24 claimed to
handle 99% of UK door locks.
The total effect of all this is that
locksmith businesses must adapt
or die!
Your best friends, to help you stay
in business, is the manufacturers
and distributors of new products
and concepts and in response, we
have seen more locksmith trade
shows than before. That is where the
new technology is on display and
where you can compare brands.
There are also various online
forums, both in the UK and
overseas and companies which run
Facebook pages to help share free
data and tips.
The MLA run Continuous
Professional Development
courses and ALA hold six monthly
meetings - where they have
demonstrations by experts.
One area however, where I feel
needs further improvement is
electronic “magazines”. Publishers
are putting out standard magazines
in pixels not on paper.
‘Don’t
take the
sellers
word for
it - phone
around,
read the
forums’
locksmithjournal.co.uk | SEP/OCT 2015
Sponsored by TradeLocks
In my opinion, it’s hard to
find what bits of it you are really
interested in and even with careful
indexing (which is often absent)
an electronic magazine suffers
from long scrolling pages, mainly
of adverts and small articles, with
no real effort to allow you to read
what you want.
We are all accustomed to
searching the Internet for
information and we learn to refine
our search terms so that we get
useful results. If publishers’ gave
a broad index of categories so you
could read the whole category or
search it for a particular word for
example; “transponders” then this
would be much preferable.
I use several forums aimed
at locksmiths and key-cutters,
and it often amuses me by posts
complaining about Chinese
copies and their performance.
Often, the replies they get are
pretty caustic and I am usually
very polite but after reading
about an American guy who
complained about how he had
spent three consecutive days
trying to programme a key with a
Chinese copy d ]