xxmikexx's Blog

Now I got to see the other side of the business -- the quiet time after Christmas. By now, to run the Villa store we only needed a small number of people, and I was asked to transfer to Big John's store, where even a non-seasonal employee had quit due to exhaustion.

 

So ... In two months I had gone from knowing nothing about the business to being asked to work full time in what I later came to realize was the highest-grossing Radio Shack store between Saint Louis (800 miles to the east) and Salt Lake City (700 miles to the west).

 

During this quiet time I began working at still other stores. I never said no, and whenever Big John would call me at home to ask if I would once again go over to some other store, my answer was the same as always: "Whatever the district needs, John. I'll be there." I even did what many other employees refused to do which was to cover the store at the intersection of 6th and Federal, the high-crime neighborhood at the heart of the main Hispanic section west of Denver.

 

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Aside: Somebody had to work this store, and it was either the manager or me. The manager, who went by the name Ski (Polish), explained that the store had never been robbed during his tenure, which was about 1.5 years by the time I met him. His secret? Treat his customers with dignity. This was a poor neighborhood. People didn't have a lot of money to spend, and quite understandably they were very sensitive to being ripped off, especially by Gringos.

 

Word very soon got around that Ski treated everybody fairly, and that if you bought something from him and it didn't work out, you could bring it back to the store and get a refund even though the normal return privilege period might have expired.

 

So ... Nobody in his right mind was going to rob Ski or his store -- the people of the neighborhood would have exacted swift vigilante justice on their own without involving the police. Similarly, Ski put the word out that nobody was to mess with me either, because if I was in the store but Ski was not, I spoke for Ski and would give the people the same good customer service that Ski did.

 

No wonder I felt comfortable in that neighborhood. People knew my face, and they knew my car. I was left alone which was all that I asked. By the way, Ski's results for his first year of operating 6th & Federal were a 40% increase in sales over the year before, all because a) he was a decent man who worked for a living just like everybody else, and because b) he understood the vital role that his store played in the life of the community.

 

Where else could people get a cheap radio? Where else could they borrow an R/C car to cheer up the life of a sick kid who had to stay home alone because his single mom, who couldn't afford day care, had to go to work? All Ski did was Do The Right Thing, and the people of the community buried him with so much business that he sometimes had to borrow me from Big John.

 

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Most of the times I worked there it was because Ski needed to take off to do personal business. (Unavoidable difficulties in his personal life.) It was either bring me in or close the store. If my coming there happened early in the morning the store would be quiet, but I was never bored. I simply did what I did at every satellite store when I found myself betrween customers -- I put out replacement price tags that I made myself out of index cards. Sometimes the original tags had simply disappeared. Sometimes, in the heat of battle, they had never been put up to begin with. (Prices changed once a year, but they all changed at the same time, so putting up the new price tags -- potentially 7,000 of them in principle -- was something that only big stores like Southwest Plaza tried to stay on top of.)

 

But there was no point in trying to track down authentic price tags because NObody at any store ever knew where they had gotten to. (They were usually thrown out by lazy employees who didn't want to do the repricing work.) So I would see an item that wasn't priced, look it up in the catalog, create a price tag using index card, pocket knife and pen, and then mount my self-made price tag. I would make the tags up in batches of five or so and then mount them in batches. With each batch taking about ten minutes, I could reprice about thirty items an hour. Do this for 3-4 hours every day for a week and we're talking about 100+ repricings, a significant issue since I always concentrated on the items with high sales volume.

 

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Soon I was not only helping open Southwest Plaza, I was made a "keyholder", which meant that I was trusted enough to unlock the store before the arrival of other employees. And on days when I happened to be working second shift there, sometimes I was given another in a series of lessons about how to close a store, which is a much more complex process than opening one.

 

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One evening an incident occurred that made me realize I had "arrived". Working by ourselves, Big John and I had finished counting the cash register drawers, and I had finished composing the bank deposit. "Okay" he said, tossing me the store keys. "I'm going home now and I want YOU to make the bank deposit."

 

He showed me how to conceal the deposit bag in the small of my back, tucked into the waist of my pants, covered by my shirt. This was crucial because the day's funds were not covered by insurance while in transit between the store and an outside bank night depository drop. So if an armed robber came into the store and cleaned out all the cash registers, that was covered by insurance. But if I were robbed on the way to the bank that would be too bad -- Radio Shack would assume that I had actually stolen the money and I would be fired immediately even though robbery was hard to prove and I probably would not be prosecuted.

 

Anyway, I knew where the night depository drop for Big John's store was -- it was right there in the Southwest Plaza mall. So John went home, I made the deposit, and then I went home feeling very pleased at the progress I was making. As it happens, Big John and I never participated in a store closing together again. Given his experienced assistant manager Little John, and given my training, there was no need for Big John to stick around once the stoor doors had been closed for the night on any night that I was working. Big John set up the schedules in such a way that either he and Little John would be on duty at 10PM, or Little John and i would be on duty.

 

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So now I was qualified to both open and close stores, and this was around the end of January as I recall.

 

Now and then during January I had been called upon to work one of Big John's other satellite stores about five miles away, the little store on Coal Mine Road. Other people called this store simply "Coal Mine". I called it "The Train Wreck".

Edited September 10, 2008 by xxmikexx

Hi Mike, started my Blog with a timid article, following your advice. Cheers!

Hi Luis,

 

Glad you made it down here. With you having set an example, I'm now going to have to finish this piece about the Z Store. :) See above.

Edited September 9, 2008 by xxmikexx

Mike, you must continue the story...now I want to know how it evolved. It requires a lot of self-confidence to build a comeback that way, tell us more!

I will do that, Luis. As you've already sensed, this is exactly a story about making a comeback. I wasn't going to say so but this is the kind of comeback that is within everybody's power to make happen.

The Coal Mine Road store -- The Train Wreck -- was what Radio Shack calls a Z store. This is the smallest kind of store that the chain operates. Villa Italia was a Y store. Southwest Plaza was an X store, the largest kind operated by the chain.

 

The terms X, Y and Z have something to do with square footage, X having the most floor space and Z having the least. But there is no predictable size for a given class of store, and certainly no standard layout.

 

At Tandy headquarters in Fort Worth, TX the Radio Shack division maintains a "model store". This is an idealized X store with optimal square footage, and an optimal layout, and with the shelves, bracket racks and piers being fully stocked so that the model store displays at least one of everything in the catalog, which contains about 7,000 items. (!)

 

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But Coal Mine was small even by Z store standards. It had only a small stockroom in the back, and the front of the store had no more square feet than a large apartment bedroom. The store was laid out as a narrowish rectangle so its length made it seem larger than it actually was.

 

Space was tight at Coal Mine. As a result only a modest subset of all the stock could be held in the front, and it required constant maintenance to keep the front stocked with the fast-moving items. Everything put out up front meant that five other things were not being put out. Furthermore, the store normally was staffed only by the manager plus a part timer (me!) from some other store, and normally only one of those people was on duty at any given moment.

 

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The manager of that store, Tony, had run into some problems in his personal life and had begun leaving the store unattended, locking it up during the day while he was absent. Also, he had mostly stopped maintaining the retail aspects of the store. Unpacked boxes of small parts were everywhere, the large item stock was dusty, the floor un-vacuumed, the items not priced, and so on. It was a mess not just to the trained eye but also to the customer eye, and that's why I called it The Train Wreck.

 

Before I was transferred to Southwest Plaza the Coal Mine manager was being backed up by one of Big John's employees. However, shortly after my transfer this person was let go and the job of supporting Coal Mine fell to me.

 

So there I was, working full time at Southwest Plaza, but usually the late shift because my early shifts mainly were spent at one of my other regular stores, Villa, 6th & Federal, or Coal Mine. Because the managers of those other stores were willing to repay Big John for my extra hours and my overtime pay, I was actually working more nearly 60 hours a week than the normal limit of 35.

 

I almost never got a day off. This was fine with me because I was getting exactly the attention and training that I had hoped for when I first walked into Big John's store back in November.

 

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EDIT 18sep-08 ...

 

You know what folks? I'll finish the story some other time and go directly to the ending. To make a long story short ...

 

Little John and I saved Big John's job one evening. To do it we had to break the rules Big Time. By then I had been offered a high paying job with MCI, a job that found me rather than the other way 'round.

 

So I had already given notice when the Tandy security people came into the store and started asking a bunch of hard questions regarding what Little John and I had done while doing the financial close during the evening of Big John's screwup. Therefore I had nothing to lose ...

 

I told Security that the whole thing had been my idea, that Little John did not know what I had done, and that their quarrel was with me and not him.

 

I don't know whether the security people took me at my word. I do know that they asked me why I had done it, and I told them that Big John was a terrific store manager, and that Tandy would be shooting themselves in the foot if they gave this big store turnaround artist and ultimately good guy the boot -- for what amounted to taking the bank deposit home with him.

 

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I've no idea whether Tandy would ever hire me back. I don't know what happened to Little John. I don't know what happened to Big John. I don't know any of these things because a day later I started work at MCI in Colorado Springs -- a commute that took me south instead of north.

 

I do know this: When I told Security that it had been my idea, in a way this was true. Little John and I were doing the financial close together with me operating the corporate network computer. When I spotted the discrepancy I immediately called it to Little John's attention. "Oh God" he said.

 

I looked at him, he looked at me, and we both nodded our heads meaning that we each understood what had to be done. I cooked the books that evening, unwinding the fraudulent transaction the first thing the next day. It never occured to me that HQ might monitor each store for exactly this kind of transaction, debooking a sale the night before and then rebooking it the next day.

 

You see, if you were to keep doing that you could walk off with the proceeds of the initial sale transaction and nobody would ever be the wiser -- unless The Great Computer In The Sky spotted the activity. In my case it was spotted the next day, and the Security people were in the store the day after that.

 

I don't regret what I did. It was the Right Thing regardless of company rules. And I thank both Pete and Big John, and the other store managers in the district, for giving me the opportunity to earn back my self respect, and for trusting me with their jobs.

 

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I see that the back story needs to be closed out. When I told big John that I would be moving on to MCI, he told me "Gee, that's really too bad. We [the district] were thinking about giving you the Z store."

 

By which he meant Coal Mine.

Edited September 19, 2008 by xxmikexx