'I was left in ruin' Store operators on the impact of the abrupt cut to their commission

When Andrew Kerr collapsed in his kitchen in 2022, his blood pressure was so high even his wristwatch knew he was in trouble.

- Simon Goodley

"They put a monitor on me to check because my [smart] watch started going off... saying [there was] a fibrillation or something," the family man from Bangor in Northern Ireland says. "This is where the stress is probably pushing in at its highest level."

But Kerr's problems lay deeper than high blood pressure and a struggling heart, as he discovered at a subsequent medical appointment arranged by his concerned wife. "I thought I was going for another heart checkup... I walked into the room and there's a counsellor sitting there, because they literally thought that I was going to kill myself with the stress and the pressure," he says, in a soft Ulster accented voice which occasionally breaks slightly. "I found myself in a position of trying to convince my wife that I wasn't going to take my life. That's where this company leads people to."

The company he is referring to is not some Wall Street investment bank that burnt him out over countless risky multimillion-dollar trades. Kerr is a middle-aged family man who had worked as a Vodafone manager for three years before taking up the telecoms group's offer to start his own business to manage two of the brand's franchised retail stores in County Down.

The lure was the chance to be your own boss - as well as the supposedly "uncapped earnings", depending on how much each franchisee improved the performance of the stores. But his entrepreneurial dream turned into a personal nightmare as the UK emerged from the first Covid lockdown in the summer of 2020, when Vodafone abruptly changed the commission rates it paid franchisees for selling mobile handsets and airtime.

Suddenly, Kerr - whose retail business had effectively been in a Covid-induced stasis for months - found it increasingly difficult to turn a profit in the new financial world, with revenues down "by 27% overnight" from pre-pandemic levels.