The Z Store
After closing our Golden Midi Music And Software business I spent 1.5 years in an unsuccessful search for a well-paying high tech job. It finally dawned on me that being 40++, and having been an entrepreneur, I had become an Untouchable.
I moped around our remotely located property for another few months till the cold weather of late Fall set in and it was no longer fun to go for walks with my favorite cat. It was actually the cat who took ME for walks, the same route every time. She would get about fifty feet ahead of me, then wait for me to catch up, then walk another fifty feet, and so on, periodically turning her head to make sure I was following her. (When she died a year later I was absolutely devastated.)
Came the day when I made a fateful decision. I was out of the computer industry. Now I would go into retailing, and I would go as far as I could, as fast as I could. It being early November, I assumed that with the approach of the Christmas selling season there would never be a better time to break in.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I drove twenty miles to the largest Radio Shack store in the Metro Denver area, the flagship store of the local district, located inside the large Southwest Plaza shopping mall. I asked to speak with the manager. Why? "Please tell him that I want a job." He's not here. "Fine, I'll wait."
I killed two hours during which time I wandered throughout the store, seeing it for the first time not simply as a customer but also as someone who might actually end up working there at Southwest Plaza. The manager finally came back from his errand, led me to a table at a fast food restaurant, and asked me a few questions. I answered them, giving him a 25-word summary of why I wanted to get into retailing. "Okay" he finally said. "Do you have a Social Security card?" I explained that it had been lost. "Get another one and then come back and see me."
He asked me to do something else as well, I don't remember what. The replacement SS card came about ten days later. My having already done whatever the other thing was, I took myself back to Southwest Plaza and had another sit-down with Big John, as I later would learn he was called. "Fine" he said. "Now I want you to go down to the district office and fill out some paperwork", whereupon he immediately got up and returned to the store before I had a chance to ask him where the office in question was.
It didn't take long to find out, and by three hours later I had filled out the papers and returned to Big John's store. He sat me down for the third time. "I'm sorry about the runaround" he said "But I needed to see what your work ethic is like. You're hired, but you can't work here. You'll be working at Villa Italia. Tell Pete Bulmer that I sent you."
I didn't know at the time that Southwest Plaza had satellite stores, that in effect those stores reported to the flagship store, and that Big John effectively was the manager of a district within an even bigger district. Rather, I felt that I had been sentenced to Siberia, especially because the Villa Italia store was even further from home and was located in a shopping mall whose clientelle had deteriorated to the point that there was actually a police station located within it.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Pete put me to work immediately, putting stock out on the retail shelves and piers, and in the stockroom. Cardboard boxes of random stuff arrived daily and, for a few days, it was my job to get everything unpacked and put away. At first, in the interests of saving time I had to go to Pete and ask where things should go. (The other employees were scornful and I tried not to have to ask them.) But gradually the store layout began to clarify in my mind, and after about a week I more or less knew where event the tiniest items were likely to be located.
All the while the Christmas shopping traffic in the store was building. You could see the increase from one day to the next, and things were starting to get a little hectic. I realized that my playing stock put-away was actually good training for what I could see was the coming battle. As I became more efficient at restocking the store I began to have time to work with customers.
Actually, I had worked with my first customer on the day I started at Villa. Somebody walked up to me, asked me a question, and I did my best to answer it. The customer then walked away for whatever reason, and the assistant manager approached me. "That's my customer" he said. "And I don't want you talking to my customers."
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Rick (that was his name) and I became friends, but not at first. The significance of the "my customer" business was that regardless of what the customer bought, and regardless of which salesperson closed the sale, credit for the sale was supposed to go to the "owner" of the customer, which meant that either a) he got to ring it up under his log-in name, or b) the other salespeople were to log in as him and ring it up for him.
This was important because Radio Shack employees made minimum wage and were limited to working 35 hours per week so that there wouldn't be any overtime (or benefits). So sales people had a strong incentive to sell as much as they could as fast as they could in order to "make commission" -- in order to sell more than the weekly thresshold amount required to begin earning commissions for that week.
Well, I never made commission. Not once. I hadn't come for the minimum wage job, I had come to get noticed by store and district management. I simply gave the best customer service I could, having decided that either a) Radio Shack would appreciate this and reward me in way other than commissions, or b) I would leave and find some other retailing home.
And I was in fact rewarded. As the shopping crowds continued to build it became necessary to hire additional seasonal help. (I was seasonal.) But sometimes there were delays in the hiring process. At other times people would start but not be able to take the job and quit.
So as the Christmas sales volume expanded, Pete began asking me to work extra shifts (I always said yes) and frequently extra days (I always said yes).
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Because I always said yes, two things happened: First, I started working a lot of overtime -- at time-and-a-half. So most weeks my take-home pay was 50-100% above 35-hours-at-minimum wage. (Story resumes at this point per Luis' request.) The second thing that happened was that I was now getting requests from Big John to work extra shifts at his flagship store in Southwest Plaza.
You must realize the importance here. This said something about how much I had learned because Big John's store did a sales volume five times that of the next biggest store, which was Pete's store in Villa Italia, my home base. Yet Southwest Plaza ran with a very small staff, only three people more than Villa, sometimes two. So for Big John to ask that I come down to his store meant that I was already viewed as a skilled Radio Shack employee -- someone who was capable of standing the pace at the Southwest Plaza store, even though I had only been with Radio Shack for a little more than a month.
Mind you, this wasn't because I possessed any special retailing skills (I don't), it was simply because I had been determined to learn as much as I could as fast as I could, my work showed it, and I began to get noticed just as I had hoped would happen.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Anyway, Thanksgiving came and went, and by two weeks before Christmas every store was always full of customers. I often started mornings at Villa Italia and then, in mid-afternoon, would go down to Southwest Plaza to finish out their business day. So except for the time required to travel between stores (20 minutes) I was on the job (and on my feet) from 9AM (by then I was helping to open the Villa store) till 10 PM, when Big John began his close. (I wasn't yet trusted to help with store closings. If I had been, I'd have been working till 11 PM.)
By a week before Christmas I was doing this every day, seven days a week. It was baptism by fire, a crash course in high volume retailing, a test -- and I was passing the test simply because I never said no and always worked my butt off.
By a couple of days before Christmas two of the other seasonal people quit from Pete's store. They simply didn't show up for work, presumably because they couldn't take the pressure any more. Anyway, that bolted me to Pete's store. We (the district, I was already beginning to think that way) -- we needed me to be at Pete's store 100% of the time ....
... Because the store was jam-packed with customers and the sales volume was very very high. People were buying anything and everything -- and they continued to buy right up till 10PM on Christmas Eve when we closed the doors with a sigh of relief. (Even then people were pounding on the doors demanding to be let in, but the policy of the shopping mall management was that all stores had to close their doors at 10PM, period end of discussion.)
So we all went home to our families, our girlfriends, our pets, depending on how lucky we had been in life. But it wasn't over yet because we only got Christmas morning off. The store re-opened at 1 PM -- not to sell anything but rather to deal with the flood of merchandise being returned by customers who had bought stuff in the last few days simply to have things to put under their Christmas trees -- but who couldn't afford to do without refunds for that very same merchandise.
That flood went on till well into the evening. The next morning we opened Pete's store as usual -- and everything was finally quiet. There had been perhaps twenty seasonal employees taken on across the district, which encompassed six or eight stores, I don't recall the exact number. Only one of these people was invited to stay on with Radio Shack as a full-time employee. That person was me, and I had d*** well earned it.
Edited by xxmikexx
6 Comments
Recommended Comments