Off the seat of a bicycle
Chapter 56)    Lumbering onward

During the same time I started taking the full lane from cars, I was also working at the lumber yard … and after a year on the sales floor, they surprisingly promoted me to assistant store manager. I was a go-getter and stocked shelves and ordered material and sold stuff out the door at 110 mph … all day long, without a break … for next to nothing in pay.

I was a regular lumber-ape … and the low pay was okay because I didn’t own anything, and still saved money.

They were grooming me for store manager of one of their outlets, but six months after the promotion my head was full of social bullshit … the bosses were chuckling quarters in their pockets and disrespecting me in tiny ways, and the world still beckoned, so I quit the same day my license photo was due … and it made for the happiest picture I’ve ever mugged for.

One week later, the yard-owner arranged a clandestine meeting, and we sat in his VW at the bank. He gave me a ‘lead’ to become a store-manager for another outfit in lower Indiana.

I didn’t ask him ‘why.’ Can you tell me ‘why’ the neighbors put out anti-freeze to kill your cats? Do they love the birds? It wasn’t important: you got your reasons, and I got my mine, thank you, goodbye.

Later I heard that sales fell sharply after I left. Shit my sales numbers were three times more than the lowest guy, and twice that of the next guy, but I never put that over the top of anybody. I liked being first but the big picture was more important, and I understood that customers want a variety of sales personalities, and my personality wasn’t right for every guy coming through the door.

One of the owners told me previously that I was a corporate-guy who never entered the corporate world. Maybe I was a bigger player than the game at hand, but if I was, I never ran it over a single person. I was there for hard work and expected the same of those around me.

A few weeks later I ended up getting the job in Marengo, Indiana and became a full-fledged store manager … Toot the Trumpet, bubba got a job!

But right quick it was a joke. I interviewed at night and didn’t see the whole picture. The yard spilled plywood in the mud, and piled one type of lumber over the top of the next. They were telling customers to come back later, or obliging the store to deliver five sticks of siding half-way down the county for free. They didn’t even have a minimum delivery charge.

The yard was stuck on old-timey customer-relations that didn’t match contemporary business practices. The employees were more interested in talking about the baked-goods for sale on the front counter than pushing stuff into the customer’s truck. There was no pro-active management and the workers were happiest standing around, ‘cause thets the way we always done it here.

Oh, don’t get me wrong, these were smart people and work was getting done, but beam-proud and give us a big ole rooster crow for the local code … which means the territory was ripe-pickins for Home Depot.

The big national retailers overtook little-town business, in part, because customers don’t want to expose personal goo-gag as a requirement of getting their truck loaded. LOL, there’s a whole lotta people who don’t like the ego-peck society.

Before long, the bottom-line came to light: the yard owed so much money to the bank that suppliers were backing off product deliveries.

The whole place was teetering bass-ackwards because nobody knew what end of the pencil to write down. The owner was an alcoholic contractor who inherited the place from his father, and used the lumber yard to supply his real interest: pre-fab government housing. A year later I heard he bid a 40-unit government project two-hundred thousand dollars below the nearest competitor just to keep the business afloat … and this was 1979 dollars.

The owner’s two sons commanded the day-to-day, but both drove out at closing time with no after-hours agenda. They were just playing store.

Wal-mart wasn’t built because Sam Walton left work on time.

The owner’s boys didn’t have the salesman’s spark or work ethic of a business leader. True business leaders can educate anyone about business, but these guys followed the ‘Cotter-hardware’ model and threw out a product mix, without regard to the buying trends of their specific store.

The owner spent money on a new computer system and a big upstairs office, but in reality he built a club-hall where his charisma would gather up a few men at day’s end to bottle-down a fifth before driving the highway home to ignore his wife. She put on a bold face of community importance, but it seemed a sham. It was none of my business, but I saw it.

The upstairs office was a partyman’s dream: a clubhouse for the owner to stay away from his wife and drink, and then on Saturday, after the store closed early, the computer operator and downstairs counter lady rolled pork behind the partition. You didn’t need a menu to see the business wasn’t about the work.

Downstairs in the main store, the shelves were half-bare because nobody pulled stuff out of the warehouse and put it up on the gondolas.

Needless to say I punched the warehouse wide open and hauled stuff to the store and posted it up for sale and kicked the baked goods off the tiny front counter and prominently laid out the saw blades … and audaciously, put prices on stuff! The whole store was filled with dirty items with no prices or with out-dated prices, and I cleaned and re-priced everything. I was minting money.

I started building racks to get the lumber off the ground, but the yard foreman put a nix on that plan. Oh no, he sez, we always stack the wood so nobody can find the rough-sawn cedar … we don’t want to sell it, we want to keep it. The place was run like a construction site, and looked like an amphetamine-driver half-dumped the inventory at first open slot.
 
It was not my job to run the yard. It was however my job to satisfy the customer and let’s face it, the foreman needed a list of things to get done. He was an alcoholic, and the owner called him his ‘step-son,’ and they drank together nightly before the younger man left for the bar.

Undeterred by the yard disarray, I installed an in-store display for water heaters, and exhibited each size so people could select the one that suited them best. People like to ‘see’ products before they buy them. People are like gorillas, and gorillas like to look over the foliage before they stuff it in their mouths. And we started selling water heaters like cow pies in a field.

Some products sold hot while others stood still, and I was trying to get a bead on what our store meant to the customer. Of course I was running blind because I didn’t see the sales figures or know the finances.

The owner’s son thought the store was supposed to lead the customer … which is true … but just because jungle-gyms sell in Albany doesn’t mean there’s a market here too.

He wanted to convert that dirty store into a ‘ladies shopping paradise’ and wanted to build elaborate bathroom displays. But two things worked against us. First I could see the town-women didn’t like our front-counter gossip-trollop, and secondly, the high-dollar tub-surrounds and fancy sinks didn’t sell. What sold were the cheap white bathtubs and white toilets, but we were out of stock constantly because the money was tied up in fancy-dan inventory.

I told Steven to forget about being a mass discounter or an upscale bath retailer … just find the products that sell and mark-‘em-up to make a profit. And if products don’t sell, then move the dead inventory at a discount and get your money back out. I was taught to ‘turn the inventory.’

Steven thought that buyers of cheap white bathtubs would suddenly see value in $900 swirly-patterned tub units. Honestly, I tried to create interest with customers, but they drove right past the fancy-dans and pointed to the cheap white tub, and said, ‘how much fer thet one?’ Forty dollars, let’s go.

One day I cornered the ‘fancy-dan-tub’ salesman and asked him why he sold ‘$28,000 of dead inventory to a store filled with 10¢ items.’ I asked him if we could return the order, which had been sitting in the warehouse covered with dust for more than a year. Can you imagine … the whole order sat unsold and the salesman was still coming around.

And the silly thing about fancy stuff is you never have the right color in stock. Once you sell out the two popular colors, then all that’s left are the damaged units and mud colors that nobody wants … and the supplier sets a high ‘minimum re-order,’ so a small store gets handcuffed trying to carry the line. This old way of doing business was another reason the national retailers took over: the big retailers could arm-twist suppliers instead of suppliers arm-twisting them.

Of course the salesman said ‘no-returns’ so I wanted to throw him out on his ear. He sold us Enron stock, and maybe I overstepped my position, but Steven got peeved since he honestly thought the ‘tub’ guy was his friend. What a horse’s crock-shot on a Sunday moon.

But God damn I tread on everybody’s special territory and made ‘em mad. What else is new?

The wet-drawered counter-lady (who was married and sharing tits with the computer operator upstairs) was mad because ‘the workers love to buy the baked goods.’ She was bad-mouthing me practically to my face. Forget that we started selling saw blades. Before I put saw blades on the counter, the customers couldn’t unpile enough dirty boxes to find them.

It’s a fucking lumber yard … we have to ask every customer which saw blade they want … we have to plant a seed in customer’s head that we’re the place to buy saw blades and nails and pipe fittings … and show the customer we care about making their business profitable. You have to build a business, it doesn’t just happen.
 
The counter-trollop refused to ask customers any sales questions. She mocked my water-heater display, and said we didn’t need it … but two days later some guy asked what the water heaters look like, and there she was leaning over the counter pointing them out … and she was completely unaware that she did it … and she was completely unaware that our customer might need a pop-off valve or pipe dope to do the job right.

I would have replaced the hostess ding-dong with the girl working the sales floor. The sales-girl caught everything I said. She was a natural, and would have punched-up sales figures starting the first day … but she wasn’t a ‘known entity in our community,’ as if the customers gave a whooping smack.

Just like the yard foreman, the counter-lady was the owner’s friend. The owner told me that our counter lady ‘wore her heart on her sleeve.’ ‘Forget that you dumb ass’ is what I thought when he said it … but it was too stupid … we needed salespeople, not a shop-hearty sweetheart …

… but sir, that ain’t the local code. We ain’t interested in selling shit.

Get this: The local code sez: “we ain’t gonna inconvenience our friends and make them buy something here when they can easily drive to the hardware store and buy it there.” Of course this defies logic, but in a strange way it makes sense, because local workers believe people go to the lumber yard to visit them.
 
And now … ta da ♪ … the brain-diagram for intelligent design is revealed.

The local-code reduces humans to the sweet-slog slurry of sexual appetite: ‘who are ya fucking, and how much did you pay for that truck?’

This is a fundamental reason why people stopped supporting local business. They don’t like to reveal personal matters to towns-folk.

Every morning when I came in, the saw blades were pushed aside and the baked goods were back on the counter … and the business didn’t make a phug nickel selling sweet bunholes … the money went to the counter-lady’s friend who never stepped further inside than to gather her take.

The warehouse guy, who idly spent the day waiting for customers to drive up to ‘his’ building, was beside himself because I removed goods from the warehouse without keyboarding-in the correct interpersonal code. Surprisingly, even the simplest gorillas require a very complex code of numbers before the magic door of acceptance opens … to reveal a gorilla.

We’re all the same way, but that jumbled pile of disorganized shit was his territory. Some days he locked the building at lunch-time so no customer could buy PVC pipe or water-heaters during the most popular hour for sales. I had to crawl in the window one day and squeeze pipe out between the locked doors.

It was comical … and I was the clown.

The owner called me in and gave me a talking-to. I would need to get permission from the other workers before I bailed out his sinking ship, which was sinking because the workers weren’t bailing smart enough to keep the ship afloat. OK, fuck you, and I left two days later.

Truth was the owner was trying to forge a compromise … he understood people … but he didn’t ask a single question … so I was done in his mind, and he likewise in mine …

… again my effervescent personality carried the day

… but understand, I was a customer pleaser, and wanted to work where people were focused on the same group goal … and that was not going to happen at the bottom of a bottle in Marengo, Indiana.
Chapter 57) Back to California
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