Work in variable conditions

Economic changes in the 1990s significantly affected Marek’s business:

‘Before these hypermarkets were built, we had had so much work that people had placed orders in March for services to be completed in October. Then came supermarkets and hypermarkets. Their products were cheap but of very bad quality so we still had work but not as much as we used to.’

To stay in the market craftsmen had to be flexible. This is what Marek says about working in the new circumstances:

‘So we made a decision: if customers did not want to come to me, I would go to them. I expanded my business and opened 13-14 field offices because then came such times that if I relied only on customers from Poznan, then I think that this workshop would have very quickly gone out of business. Whereas thanks to this move, I had many commissions from the field offices. But I had to go and collect [the things to be repaired], bring them to my place, do the job and [then] take them back.’