Hamish Champ: Discovering customer service in Bluewater

I don't know about you, dear reader, but I have several ideas of what Hell might be like. One of them is definitely a visit to the Bluewater shopping centre, near Greenhithe in Kent.

Driving my son there yesterday we came off the A2 and descended into the former chalk quarry, now a place where a different sort of mining goes on.

Heading down the ramp my heart similarly sank as the centre's car parks hove into view, packed with vehicles, no doubt their owners milling around inside at the usual sub-walking pace speeds that afflicts humanity in shopping malls, dragging reluctant offspring in their wake before joining mile-long queues outside Ed's Diner or jostling for stools at the Yo! Sushi conveyor belt.

Still, at least we wouldn't be hanging around. We were on a mission. My 10 year-old wanted to head for a shop called Games Workshop in order to buy paint for some models he had bought for a strategy board game called Warhammer 40,000, whose rather fetching tagline is 'In the grim darkness of the future there is only war'. Nice.

Anyway, the boy knew what he wanted. And, like the commandos who planted explosives all over that heavy water treatment plant in the film The Heroes of Telemark, I was pretty confident we would be in and out of the place in a matter of minutes, God willing.

Now, the people who work at Games Workshop might tend towards the geeky, and getting excited about centimetre-high plastic models of orcs and fighting battles on a landscaped tabletop with the aid of a ruler and a couple of dice isn't everyone's cup of tea. It certainly isn't mine. But my goodness, the enthusiasm among the shop's staff for the product, for the world of Warhammer and crucially for those interested in entering it has to be seen to be believed.

What impressed me, much as I was doing my best to get in and out of the place in record time, was not just the level of customer service but its scope; the interaction being shown to all and sundry by the shop assistants to young and old(er) customers who had entered their realm was quite something.

Taking time to show kids how to paint models of considerable detail that were half the size of one's thumb; apologising profusely for keeping a few people waiting at the till; waxing lyrical about a product - a Warhammer novel, in one case - not, it seemed, simply to make the customer feel better about parting with their cash, but because they seemed to genuinely think it was a great book.

It made you wonder why more shops weren't like this. Indeed why all shops aren't. In short, nothing was too much trouble for the everso slightly nerdy Games Workshop crew.

And while we all know the pressures they are under, how many people in the pub sector can say that?