A Season of Change....

has begun at my little Chicoland. Cherry, our store manager, has formally announced that she is retiring at the end of August. It is as if a weight has been lifted in so many ways.

Just to recap, Cherry broke her ankle last October and was off work and out of the store for five months. In that time, Joyce, Karen and I were essentially running the store...and we did a good job. It was good for me because I did feel like I stepped up to the plate and I must admit I felt kind of good about myself. That is a very hard thing for me to admit. We maybe only hit our sales plan two out those five months but everybody's business was down.

Flash forward...Cherry came back parttime in late January and things have been chaotic ever since. Scheduling became a nightmare in the extrme. Karen had been doing the schedules in her absence and after a slight learning curve, our ladies were happy, liked their regular days, and we were within our payroll hours. Cherry took over the schedule when she got back and it became not pretty. Our store has 225 base hours per week for payroll and she would schedule 249. I am sure she had her reasons for doing so but I sure didn't understand them.

The worst part is that Cherry got nasty when she came back...particularly to me and Karen. She has issues with Karen because Karen had been acting as a manager in her absence and her technical title is "Sales Lead" which translates as she can open and close the store but really doesn't have decision making power. Karen knows the ins and outs of the store as well as any of us and is a savvy business woman. She was a district manager for the company that handled Nina Ricci and Carolina Herrera fragrances. She knows her way around retail. Since she has been back, Cherry has picked apart every management type of decision that Karen has made and keeps reminding all of us "She is not a manager". She was in Cherry's abscence as far as Joyce and I and our ladies were concerned. On many occassions, Karen was the voice of much needed sensibility and reason.

As far as her attitude to me...whatever I did... it was wrong. I thought I was being paranoid and insecure until a couple of comments about her behaviour to me were passed in my direction...from our ladies. It was nice to know that I wasn't making mountains in my head and I became very glad that I am short and can hide behind the racks. It got to the point that I hated going to work and almost felt sick about having to be there on the same days she was. It's awful to feel like you are screwing up royally and have no idea why. This is retail...not brain surgery but I swear if I put a pair of pants on a hanger, the way I hung them would have been wrong in her eyes. Logically, I knew none of this really had anything to do with Karen or myself. The talk among our ladies was "She is acting nuts and needs to take meds or up her dosage."

So Cherry has made her announcement...and the weight has been lifted. She has been so much happier in the past week and is more like the Cherry that hired me..the person who encouraged, had an easy laugh, and was just fun.

Retail is not an easy job...at least in my store. It is hard, physical labor. I heard the story when I was off for my foot surgery of the woman hired who lasted two days. She was a customer that we had hired...and she was shocked that she had to run the vacuum cleaner and clean the mirrors at the end of the night. (I guess my working at Cedar Point the summer of the Bicentennial and having to bleach the patios and change the fryers every night has tempered my view of "glamourous jobs"....I was in college expectations were low and we got to use the beach.)

The bottom line is that I am glad she is leaving...not for the way that sounds. She didn't want to come back, had been talking about leaving before her accident, and just needed this time back in the store to make closure. She has a granddaughter who just turned a year and she wants to spend time with her. She misses being with her family...her son is in town, but her parents who she worries about are in Toledo and her daughter is in Lexington....and the epiphany I just had.

She's a widow of 19 years and is turning 62 the end of this month.

She's just worried about time.