Entertainment value keeps them rolling in the aisles

Leaving his offices and walking to his neighbouring supermarket in Sutton, Dublin, Feargal Quinn is trapped by a finger-wagging woman determined to make her complaint forcefully to him. She is placated after five minutes and Quinn moves on. It would be a highly unusual encounter at another multiple retail store - to have the managing director move between customers, greeting them, offering doughnut tokens to those with kids and joking as he goes. But not at Superquinn.

Everybody wants to be greeted with a smile and entertained, Quinn says, and his manner is easy, learned from his father, Eamonn, who was a grocer and later ran a summer camp business in Skerries, Co Dublin. "I can influence people so well with good humour and this is something I probably learnt from my father, the ability to smile, the ability to be in good form, the ability to - I would almost use the word - entertain.

"The vast majority of us are willing to be entertained," he maintains. If he had not been a supermarket owner, Quinn says he would have chosen to be a hotelier, attributing his love of dealing with people to his days at the Red Island holiday camp in Skerries. He says of his father: "He found everybody interesting, and found something interesting in everybody. I think I inherited that, not so much from the genes, but from his behaviour."

Feargal Quinn's other main pursuit is as a member of the Seanad, a post that allows another outlet for his views and some respite for his family who, he confesses, " have to listen to me so much".

Quinn enjoys talking, frequently digressing into anecdotes, using them by way of example to illustrate the answer to what seems a straightforward question. "I drift, if you're not careful I drift," he warns. Next month he will be 61, and the business will be 37 years old. Does he feel his age? "Funnily enough I don't. I actually still think of myself as young. Because I am not tall, I still think of myself as small or young. I feel as energetic as ever. "I think there is almost a self-fulfilling prophecy in the way you look at life." With a ruddy complexion, silver hair, five children and five grandchildren, he still exudes a youthful enthusiasm. The significance of a rather nice pin worn on a loud tie over a striped shirt is finally explained. It is a boomerang, symbolising the importance of getting the customer to come back and neatly encapsulating his key personal goal.

For one so often in the public eye, it is fitting that the inspiration for his name was derived from a daily newspaper which informed his father that his son was born on the feast of St Fearghal. "I dropped the `h' but kept the `a'," he says. It means strange or bright person, although Quinn prefers the latter definition. He may have grown into his name in both senses: Bright he certainly is, and strange - or at least unusual - to be a senator and a supermarket owner, to have been a member of a groundbreaking committee on education policy and to have evolved his own management style. "One of the things I had to teach myself and this applied for instance when I became chairman of An Post - I was no longer full time in Superquinn.

"I had to teach myself not to try and do everything myself."

Although books devoted to management theory are traditionally US-orientated and he counts best-selling author Peter Drucker among his friends, Feargal Quinn's own philosophy is a mixture of wisdom picked up from his parents and developed during a lifetime in business. One of his favourite books is Irishman Charles Handy's The Empty Raincoat.

Rising at 6.30 every morning, Quinn loves going to work, putting in his best hours in the morning time, and getting to bed before midnight.

He says he hopes he is sensible enough to know that the day he ceases "getting the buzz out of it" or stops transferring his enthusiasm, he will retire to other pursuits. He does allow one element of self indulgence.

"I would love to give more time to golf. I won the gold medal in Portmarnock last year," he says.

He enjoys "creating change", such as the work he did on the steering committing on the Applied Leaving Certificate, which seeks to recognise and reward the non-academic intelligences. "It caught my imagination no end. I get such satisfaction from beginning to see results of it. The first graduates came out, in effect, last month.

"I have a sense of satisfaction, this sounds very big headed, but I have a sense of satisfaction from feeling that I have been involved in making changes, and making sure that Ireland is a slightly different country than if I had not been able to influence the matter."

Feargal Quinn's own contribution to the management library, Crowning the Customer, was first published in 1990 and has been translated into five languages. "Handling a complaint well is like scoring a try," he writes, "It can deepen your relationship with that customer, and make him or her more likely to come back to you to do more business."

His shop managers, on the other hand, get a dingy office to encourage them to spend as much time as possible on the shop floor.

His father had an adage about customers that Quinn has held onto: "Don't look to make a profit this year. Coax the crowd back next year."

That does not mean he's uninterested in profit, it means he's interested in the long-term profit, the son says.

His favourite saying is an Irish one, `Eist le fuaim na habhainn mar gheobhaidh tu eisc', listen to the sound of the river if you want to catch fish, modified by him from the original `salmon'.

"If it is one thing that I learnt over the years, it is that none of us listens enough.

"I claim that we listen, and I hope that we are right, to our customers more than our competitors do," he says.

Despite the radical changes facing the retail trade and rapidly intensifying competition, Quinn is comfortable with Irish competitors and appears unfazed that Dunnes has opened a store in Swords. However, foreign multiple stores make him uneasy although he puts his faith in the ability of indigenous industry and customers to hold firm. "The biggest competitors are those companies coming in from abroad. I think it would be a shame if they were able to take over the Irish retail market.

"If they do so, it is our fault as a nation."

He says that Tesco, following its pull-out from Ireland in the 1980s after a 10-year experiment, has "bought" its customers in its acquisition of Quinnsworth and Crazy Prices.

"If that is the way they are going to take Irish business by buying the companies, the questions is: `Can we manage to coax those customers to come back to Irish retailers?'." But he is not pessimistic about the future of retailing, and sees echoes of his own business style, with its tightly focused series of 17 stores, in the US.

"It is the local, efficient chain which is the leader, and the big national chains have not been successful in any one particular state".

Quinn disagrees with the concept of a minimum wage "in principal", saying he believes that there are a number of people happy to pack bags in his stores, a service he can afford for his customers at a starting wage of £2.35 an hour. "Retailing is a mobile career and a marvellous paying career for those who are able to take responsibility," he says.

Quinn's mother was conservative and religious and he has inherited a spiritual outlook from her. "I would still be unhappy not to find time each week to make a break, even by just going to Mass, even if it is to force yourself to stop in the world and to think of something less worldly. And I think that came from her very much."

He was nominated by his grandfather and father to the Knights of Colombanus in the mid-1950s. He has maintained his membership, although he is not active except for helping with the annual charity dinner at Christmas. "I am not shy at all about being a Catholic, being a lay Catholic, and I received a papal knighthood in 1994, which I feel proud of.

"And I am not ashamed. I do not hide it. I think that is not common nowadays. It seems that people are shy about being Catholic."