This year Springfield has been celebrating 25 years since Frances and I bought the business. It’s been an eventful 25 years and we are extremely grateful to all of our employees past and present, our suppliers and our amazing customers many of whom have been with us for most, if not all the 25 years.
The 25th year did get me thinking a little bit about how life and the local area has changed during that time:
1998 was the year we all started to buy Nokia mobile phones :-)
It used to take an hour to get from Bedford to Milton Keynes over Brogborough Hill.
The Granada offices in Bedford had a Paternosta lift.
Xscape (Snozone) building work started in Milton Keynes.
Bedford and St Neots floods.
Queueing at the Black Cat roundabout………..
Old style computer screens.
David Beckham being sent off against Argentina
Geri Halliwell left the Spice Girls.
We all started using Microsoft Office and tried to use search engines on the web.
Looking back now it was around this time that IT in the office really started to have an impact, the fax machine was still the preferred way of sending a document but we also started to use emails and attach word documents. The downside to using a PC at the time was how long it would take to load a programme or sending a document, I remember being able to make a cup of tea in the time it would take for the PC to load. The windows PC was separate to our DOS based order processing and accounting system, they couldn’t work on the same system. Then we were told about the millennium bug and we were all doomed. We would be stuck in lifts, all power would go off, and the whole world would stop.
Thankfully nothing really happened and we all carried on as normal once the New Year celebrations had passed.
We look back with fond memories of the Nokia phones, the fax rolls and the time spent in traffic jams at Brogborough Hill or the Black Cat. Some of the things from 25 years ago have improved, some haven’t. Black Cat roundabout on a Friday!
I looked at the top selling products by Springfield 25 years ago and Paper was top of the list along with Tippex, Fax rolls and floppy disks. Advancement came when Windows 95 was available on CD. Today the top selling items are still Paper, but also include Coffee & Tea, Toilet rolls and now USB flash drives.
What has stayed as a constant though through the last 25 years are our wonderful customers many of whom we prefer to call our friends. 95 % of our customers are based withing 25 miles of our office here in Bedford, we all know where the traffic jams are, we all know the back roads into Milton Keynes, Sandy and St Neots. We all understand that we need to support each other on a local level, this could be the local village fete, a charity fund raiser or just making sure that we are OK.
Thank you to all of you for being with us over the last 25 years we do really appreciate your support and loyalty and we look forward to serving you for the next 25 years.
Jason Stephen
