pencil & a questionnaire to fill out, the questionnaire was more like some Human resources personality test with hundreds of questions along the lines
of “do you keep a diary”, “do you look at a diary daily” I’m led to believe
some 1000 people attended this test, then we I think we’re all lead one by one to a lift with the HR manager & up to another level into a suite
serving as an interview room. I was asked the usual questions, why did you apply etc then the HR manager asked me the question, “tell me all you know about Commodore” for over 1 hour I spouted out about the vic, the commodore 64, the Amiga & the Amiga 4000 /040 & my history of Commodore & the
main people who made up the company.

The interviewer sat amazed at, one I had purchased an amiga 4000 as he said
I was one of the first to order the machine from his records, & Two at
the amount of information coming from this young mind. He looked at his
watch & realised he was now well behind schedule for his interview list
and had to cut me mid conversation, I think we were scheduled 15 minutes.

So after shaking hands & myself still spurting on about commodore
architecture he said “great to meet you & I will see you on the next interview sessions” he then went red & said “oh I shouldn’t have said that”, & as you have guessed your now onto round 2 which is really a formality with Debenhams”

A week letter I had a phone call from Sidcup kent & was invited to Round 2
was more as was said an informal chat with Debenhams security just to check
I wouldn’t steal more than I would sell I suppose, after that chat I went home & waited, sure enough I received another phone call “congratulations
and welcome to the team” I was then advised I had to travel to Sidcup to receive a weeks worth of gruelling training, There we met a the directors
and had a quick look at how mail ordering works & how the posters are
printed for the magazines, Silica owned its own photographic studio that
could enlarge & print posters of enormous size as well as scan images. We
saw a machine that could copy tapes & inlays in seconds, along with
another machine that copied floppy disks & inlays & sleeves in literally seconds spewing them into a hopper at the bottom of the machine.

Training went well & the last 3 days we were assigned shops, mine was
Tottenham court road TCR the main silica Shop hub, it was an amazing experience, although I knew I had to up my knowledge of consoles, PC systems and the Amiga, & to some extent the Atari were already under my knowledge
belt, having assessed the Atari falcon before my Amiga 4000 due to the then supposed DSP the falcon would have for music.

Silica also ran the Amiga helpline, & in training I managed to sit in on a
few sessions with confused customers trying to get printers working or
change country settings, some had more grand experiences & problems like genlocking & wanting to know how to setup the NTSC video toaster for a pal broadcast!

We opened shop in Manchester on the third floor of Debenhams next to the toy department, Café where I met my soon to be wife of 25 years a café manager, and also nestled next to a discount books & Cd concession. Although pay
was meagre to say the least you had the opportunity via sales to earn commission & items were weighted on a pints system & via the profit they
made, so floppy disks were a 9/10 & a printer would be about 2 with a pc
1 , the scaled didn’t relate to a percentage just an arbitrary guide to a points system.

I remember we would get IBM & Hewlett Packard telling us if we sell 10
machines were entered into a draw to win a holiday, although I said I would rather sell people what they want & not what profited me the most. This is something currys excel in, guiding you to something you don’t wat to gain commission or sell outdated stock.

Sales were good, very good) we had some real characters enter, some miffed
at not being picked for the sales team, but others with genuine interest & excitement about products. Each of the staff had a strength so we had a PC
a nd upgrade specialist, a console expert, a programming guru who knew
about amigas an ex magazine writer & myself the Amiga specialist, Oh and
a manager who oversaw us. The manager later left after some 250k of stock
went missing, stolen out the shop & I was then promoted to manager, things
went well & Debenhams would come to empty the tills 3 times a day as the
cash wouldn’t fit into them we were taking so much.

The death of my dream
I got on well with the directors, especially well with one who would ply me with inside knowledge & also with the head programmer who gave me access
to items on my shop computer menu I shouldn’t have had like the IN/out
system where you could see who was in or out at head office, so if a
director went in at 6am then clocked out at 6.30 & it was now 10 you
could be pretty sure he was going to spy on a shop!

My sources would also called to say “next week is a spot inspection” or “You have a director coming to the store with family to do a plain clothes walk round” Interestingly when directors came they would normally ware the green Silica tshirts & even if they were in mid conversation, if a
customer needed help they would break off & help the customer! Not
something that happens in forms today, as they feel they are above everyone.

Liquidation
On one of my calls I was relayed the sad news “commodore is in liquidation”
and I am to visit you tomorrow, the director relayed the news almost in
tears that an era had come & Commodore was in real trouble, there may be
a buyout but it wasn’t certain. I was told that the shops relied on Commodore, silica tried to invest heavily in a OEM pc they badged up as
Silica pc, & although it gained good reviews, & was a great price, the
company couldn’t gain supply of the machines in enough quantity, Silica put more money to get the machines, but eventually this would lead to Silica
with cash flow problems & then close the shops & mail ordering
completely, I left about 2 years before they closed the Manchester branch,
they had directors missing a month’s pay just to keep things going, selling off shop fittings, but it was fairly obvious even from the news about
Commodore administration they wouldn’t survive.

Shopping history
So you read my take, & there are many other stories like, other mail order companies over took them etc, but it really was the demise of commodore
that killed Silica.

History
Silica Shop was a UK-based computer retailer & distributor who sold Atari, Amiga, Sega, Nintendo & other platforms in the 1980s & 1990s. It was
founded by David Martin in 1982, & had its original shop in Sidcup, Kent.
It later expanded to have several stores across the UK, including over 19 concession stores within Debenhams. However, it went into administration in 1996, due to financial difficulties.

Silica Shop was popular among Atari fans, as it offered a wide range of

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