Barrie and Les saw customer care as an essential part of their role as porno merchants.
Some might laugh at that notion, given pornography’s normal place in the world. It was all very well people pretending it was near enough respectable now, but the reality was that, even if you used porn, you tended not to talk about it. You weren’t generally interested in building a rapport with the providers – you just wanted to acquire your goods and go (said goods then to reside in a secret compartment in your home where hopefully no one would ever find them). No, one wouldn’t normally have thought this a business where the friendly touch would pay dividends, but Barrie and Les, who’d jointly and successfully managed Sadie’s Dungeon, their street-corner sex shop for twelve years, didn’t see it that way at all.
Certainly Barrie didn’t, and
