Small Store Suicide Prevention Post

There used to be a convenience store, about halfway into town. It used to belong to some family friends. Then it belonged to Nasty O’Meany who trapped all the cats and took them off to be murdered when the proprietor of the Jackson Street Cat Sanctuary was in the hospital. After the word spread, O’Meany got out fast and some other people, call them the Newbys, reopened the store.

But not for long. It is possible that some people never noticed that the store changed hands. Likely those people have just formed a habit of not buying food in convenience stores because you pay so much for the convenience and, as you are there to put gas in a car, you are probably going into town anyway. Then the next convenience store, about a mile away, on the edge of the business district in town, is an Addco store, owned by Addingtons. Trading with Addingtons is like voting for Kilgores. People who live here just do.

Personally, I checked out Newby’s Store when it opened. It didn’t have much of a selection and the prices weren’t even funny. Mrs. Newby asked what kind of thing I bought. I gave her the very short list of affordable food products with low enough glyphosate content that I dared to eat them last year, with prices. I didn’t try to estimate how many other people have learned that those are the safe food items to buy, too, but I know the supermarkets have had a hard time keeping stocked up on them. (The list was shorter, at the time, than the list I posted last month.)

I gave Mrs. Newby points for at least checking out the list and sadly reporting next week that she couldn’t offer competitive prices on what I normally buy. I checked, when I was nearby, for anything I could stand to buy in that store, at all. Some days there was something, some days not. One day, I remember, I didn’t want to go all the way into town for cat food, but the price and quality of cat food in Newbys’ store were a bad joke. I bought the cats a can of dog food, which they ate cheerfully enough as a novelty, and bought kibble in town the next day.

The shelves have never been completely filled in that store. Newbys’ store has always had that “we need to sell four more bags of potato chips before we can order any more Fritos” look.

This actually works for me. I like to see ventures start out small and grow. Like a large number of the Yuppie Generation I’m underwhelmed by the yuppie approach to business—make a big splash with a big initial investment, even if that means debt and bankruptcy. I applaud the microinvestor who spends what person can afford to spend, starts with a handful of postcards on a street corner, then rents space in a flea market or for a roadside stand, then a little store, then a big one; I understood the social anxieties and financial cravings that motivated Grandma Bonnie Peters to go for the big splash and achieve the typical yuppie’s big fail, but if I’d been the one trying to commercialize Veggie Burgers I would’ve waited to build up the profits from selling them to local stores and restaurants, as a local specialty, before trying to put them in big-chain stores. For success to be multigenerational never hurt a business story. Overnight money-gushers tend to dry out as fast as they gushed.

(If you’re thinking “That’s a really conservative approach all right!” you can balance it with this: I do believe progress is made, and should be made, with new improved products every year. Trying to replace Coke with New Coke was a bad idea. Simply introducing Cherry Coke, Vanilla Coke, the flavor of this summer, is a good idea. Applies to lots of different things besides soda pop. “Progress” toward socialism in politics, or toward humanism in Christian churches, we don’t need, but in business we can benefit from “progressive” thinking.)

So one day when I ran out of groceries two days before the next car pool ran, I planned to stop at Newbys’ store and, if at all possible, buy provisions for two days, even if the prices were exorbitant, to help the Newbys along. But I was prepared to keep walking to the Addco store if necessary.

As I walked in I heard Mrs. Newby saying on the phone, “I’ve had one customer all day…Oh, I’ve got a customer!”

She didn’t need to cut off the conversation just yet. I was browsing. Maybe she wanted to cut off the conversation. Maybe it was like some conversations that people were having just before they gave me cell phones, onto which I recorded voice mail messages like “If you’re a bill collector looking for X, get in line behnd me. If you’re a friend of X's, you may leave a message, especially if it's a job order that will help X pay that bill.”

But Mrs. Newby bustled up into the aisle…I’d picked up the one bag of Fritos, considered the very depleted supply of M&Ms but not picked up anything, and was now trying to think of something to make with the can of Hunt’s Garlic & Herb tomato sauce. There was rice on the shelf, but not a kind I use. There were cans of beans…no, pork and beans. I hate the idea of eating anything as yucky as a hog is, even when it’s alive, and I’m not keen on sugar in beans either. There were cans of corn…

And there was a noise as of idle gabbling in the aisle beside me. “Are you finding everything you need?”

Stupid question. Nobody finds everything they need in any kind of store. Nobody even finds all the groceries they need in a convenience store. I said, “I’m not finding everything I’m looking for.”

Mrs. Newby already knew what I was looking for because I’d given her a list. She already knew she didn’t have it in stock. So that was her cue to find something else to do but she didn’t take it. She tried another piece of idle gabble. Saying “Do what, honey?” instead of “Excuse me, I didn’t hear that,” was apparently a joke before Mrs. Newby, who’d be about my age, was alive. I think it came from “Amos’n’Andy.” It has not raised a laugh in our lifetime.

I turned around to give her a literal cold shoulder.

And, by the way, forget about the tomato sauce. For one thing I’d just seen the price on the canned corn. For another thing a pushy sales pest is more likely than even an overflowing toilet or an empty gas pump to make me think about going on to the next store. For another thing, any word that sleazy men utter to women on street corners is a good word never, ever to use in conversation with any woman who is actually talking to you, but the one that also refers to the contents of an outhouse is a good word never to use at all. Maybe even when talking about the “food” product most likely to contain enough glyphosate to make everyone ill, we should say "bee vomit."

Pity. I was in that store because up to that moment I had felt some sympathy, even some respect, for Mrs. Newby.

A few things I’ve learned from my own “must sell X amount of this before I can get any more of that” ventures:

1. “People” are of more than two kinds: introverts, extroverts, and those who don’t identify as either one. Only the extroverts want to be chattered at. Introverts dislike idle chatter

2.. The right price for anything is what the customer paid for it the first time person bought one. Any price higher than that is a great big cold prickle, and no, you can’t cover up the cold prickle with any sort of words. If you really caaared about the customer, you’d not ask for an exorbitant price. That’s why any attempt to sound “friendly” sounds like a lie, like an insult to the customer’s intelligence, and like, in all probabillity, an act you’re doing to cover up even more dishonest things you’re doing as you gabble. That’s why even extroverts often bristle when store employees try to be “friendly.” Give it up already. Try to seem respectful and as if you, personally, are not more dishonest than the company requires you to be.

3. With a few possible exceptions for utterances like “Excuse me, Sir, your trousers are on fire,” let the customer speak first.

4. When people are distracted or overstimulated, they may forget to buy things. Assume that all customers are trying to remember long lists of chores and errands, and don’t add any further distractions.

5. Obviously, “no further distractions” means you don’t call a customer. The Bible says “Let your yes be yes and your no be no.” If you were brought up to feel that “yes” and “no” need “softening,” I’m sorry for you and I hope you will take an opportunity to learn from plain-spoken Christians if you ever get one. Meanwhile, if you must attach any other words to “yes” and “no,” the best choices are “Sir’ and “Ma’am.”

6. Everyone involved has more fun when the person of higher status (in this case the customer) has the chance to invite the other person to use less formal manners. When we address people we don’t know as “Sir/Ma’am” we give them the opportunity to say, if they so choose, “My name is Satyajitanandapriyakumarprasadarao.” Meh. I think I’d stick with “Sir” in that case. But you get the idea.

7. In our culture most women, most people of color, most people who are or appear to be much older or younger than those around them, and most people who have or appear to have less money than those around them, have unfortunately learned to associate chummy or informal manners with prejudice against any or all of those things that may apply. Try not to waste any energy babbling aboout how you are special because in your family everyone called your parents, grandparents, teachers, doctor, and the minister by their given names. A person who does not belong to your family and is female, of color, older, younger, or less wealthy, does not have a given name. Person's name is "Ma'am."

8. Most introverts won’t do you the favor of telling you why they’re avoiding you. I have some relatives who are really sadistic about this. They never say they’re angry or offended, although they are, and they never say why, or what they would like you to do. From my point of view, that’s emotional abuse and adequate justification for divorce, loss of custody, and worse. If someone else guesses what they might have found offensive they’ll say, in a really pucker-faced, Uriah-Heepish manner, that you “should have known better than to say or do that”—whether or not anyone outside the little social clique who meet in their church building every Sunday would agree. Being related to them is not much more fun than trying to do business with them is, but there are a lot of them and, despite their poor-mouthing, they have a lot of money. Lose one of these horrible customers, lose the lot; can you keep enough other customers to spare them, or not? This is one of the little things that cause so many people to believe that it’s impossible to make an honest living in my town. These are not intentionally evil people; they are unsophisticated, self-conscious people who have picked up a lot of very misguided ideas about human relationships and communication and so on. People like them are found in big cities too, but as demographic blocs, in cities they’re probably less dangerous.

9. Many people in a small town love to listen to the gossip. They don’t want to be gossipped about, though, so after hearing all the latest misinformation about everyone else’s affairs, before you can start telling other people your ideas about their affairs with the credibility of old acquaintance, they will start taking their money to Kingsport. I believe gossip is killing my town, and it starts when employees chatter. 

One of the reasons I think this blog is worth keeping up is to give people an example of the kind of conversation that I’m comfortable hearing in public places. Any topic is good—this web site is supposed to be about books and writing, but it’s also about the weather, about health, news, business, sports, politics, religion, recipes, cats, phenology, personal relationships, education…mercy, I’ve even posted about cars. Not to mention chickens. But never does this web site mention the real name or story of any living private person. Authors, “celebrity” actors and athletes and suchlike, elected officials, etc., are fair game.. But I’ve posted about some “celebrities” I’ve known personally—as private secretary, writer’s assistant, masseuse, old school friend, housemate—and you don’t know which ones those are, because all I’ve said about them is what’s already in the news.

10. No matter how much you dislike a customer, or a type of customer, or a type of order. There might even be valid reasons to dislike a person. Some people say that small-town gossip can sometimes contain truths and help people resist oppressors. That can happen but, in my experience, of all tidbits I’ve heard about third parties, whether they seemed outrageous or predictable, a good two-thirds aren’t even true. Someone says “X finally died,” and you say “Sorry to hear that,” and the next time you’re in town you see X walking around, telling people about having been in a diabetic coma, very much alive. 

But if you insist on forming personal relationships with customers—well, you’re going to bond with some, and the reverse is going to occur with others. So there can eventually be valid reasons to dread seeing someone approach. Maybe it’s not just gossip; the person does indeed shoplift, or go into long loud repetitious monologues, or refuse to wear the diapers person needs. And even then. 

When the Weber City market existed and I had a booth in it, there were several geriatric patients who used to wander around the building, making messes and muttering offensive words and generally discouraging actual customers, not to mention vendors. The worst was a fragile little fellow in his late eighties, about 4'9" and not very steady on his feet, who used to stagger into my booth and mutter things of a sexual nature. I mentioned him to someone else, who said, “Are you scared of him?” I was indeed scared that if he ever touched me, and I pushed him away, I’d knock him down on the concrete floor; the impact would shatter his brittle old bones and I’d go to jail for abusing a poor sick patient. I tried to get the owner or the manager of the building to ban him and two of the nastier old females from the building. They refused. 

Finally, one day, the little old pest staggered in while both my Significant Other and an equally impressively built relative were in the building, browsing in other booths.. He muttered something obnoxious. I stepped into the doorway and waved and said loudly, “I didn’t quite hear that. Maybe you’d like to repeat it to that gentleman over there, or that one?” Both of them were a foot and a half taller than he was. After seeing them converge on the booth the little pest became quite respectful and even used to buy things when he got his pension check. My cousin even befriended him and flattered him by giving him odd jobs suited to his strength, or lack of it. 

So there may be ways to handle a really undesirable shopper that will not backfire on you, if you really think about it.

But if you just want to do the middle-school thing and say “Nyah nyah nyah you can’t come into my store,” consider Wendy’s. Like many people, before glyphosate I used to like their 99-cent menu; for the price the food seemed decent. Then the news went around that at some Wendy’s outlets some managers were actively trying to discourage Black people. Well, if some of The Nephews are not welcome in a place I don’t believe I, or the other Nephews, their parents, or any of our friends or relatives would want to hang out there either, right? That whole chain lost a lot of customers, whether those customers were Black, or had ever felt unwelcome in the Wendy's outlets they used, or not.

Some customers just go away, whatever you do; leave town, decide they’ve bought enough of whatever-you-sell for this lifetime, become too ill to shop. That costs you only one customer, or at most two. But if you lock horns and actively try to lose one, you’re going to lose more.

Newbys’ store would not be the first store in Gate City where “one customer all day” represents the best day they’ve had all week. It can happen just because the rising cost of gas discourages people from driving into town, let alone when a storekeeper decides to lose one customer.

I remember a junk store that flourished briefly on Jackson Street before it expanded into a bigger location in Kingsport. I heard some things about the proprietors, paid them no mind. I saw that, whatever the woman might have done before marriage, she did get onto good terms with the most notorious pair of Bad Girls in town. One day she was out on the sidewalk talking with them. I started to skirt around them. The storekeeper waved, the drug whore cackled, and the woman who might or might not have run a house of ill fame in the 1940s but had certainly run a crooked business since then just squealed with malicious glee at my embarrassment, but the store had in fact acquired a shipment of fine wool yarn. Ten minutes later, the crook and the hooker went their ways. The storekeeper came inside, and I bought the yarn. I learned something, too. I still don’t know whether the owner of the junk store was a lady in any sense of the world, but she had what it took to succeed in a town the size of mine. She was willing to work with anyone.

There are, in what the rest of the county not very affectionately call “the Gate City Clique,” some who want our very walkable and historic little business district to become “upscale.” “Boutique stores,” a female councilman (I think “councilmember” sounds worse than “female councilman’) enthused once, pointing to the one upscale gift shop and the one—well—store that specialized in previously unworn women’s clothes, side by side. I wouldn’t describe the clothing store as “upscale” because it sold casual, whimsical summer dresses for $15, but let’s just say that there were dresses in that store that I would have been willing to buy at an end-of-season sale for $2, anyway. Which, for any men who may be trying to decipher this paragraph, means it was a few cuts above the usual cheap-casual-clothing store. But it’s gone now.

We have seen many “upscale” stores come and go. A couple, if they were (1) really good and (2) pushed by Addingtons, have lasted for more than a year. We had a real-jewelry store for several years and we’ve had a really cute gift shop for several years. Those are the exceptions. The businesses that have prospered and lasted on Jackson Street have been totally midrange.

And here I stand to testify that, whether I’ve been shopping as a diplomat’s wife or as a penniless widow—I like midrange. There are qualities merchandise can have that make it worth paying for; real cashmere is worth more than cotton and real cotton is worth more than nylon, but deliver me from a snooty store that spends a lot of money on advertising and “atmosphere.” I don’t like or want to encourage pretentiousness, ostentation, impracticality, or snobbery in any form.

This female councilman was saying to me, “How can a bookstore be upscale like that gift shop? Which sells books!” Well, yes, a couple dozen, mostly gag-gift books; nothing you could call a book store, or even a book section. Which is cool.

Well…I know books. I know bookstores. There is a pronounced tendency for bookstores to attract quiet people who do well in school, who then tend to be offered fairly respectable jobs and salaries. Whenever my bookstore springs into full physical life, which it will do, I expect it to attract more teachers, artists, and scientists than coal miners.

Here's the thing: I do not want in any way to exclude any coal miners who happen to want to read books. “They don’t.” Maybe most of them don’t but everybody in Gate City knows one business owner who was a coal miner for a year or two, in between high school and the Army, and during that time he read books. He could carry on a conversation with the people who'd gone to university, and he had dropped out of a useless coal camp school before even finishing grade six. He got his education from library books and the Army. So such things can happen. I do not want to prevent them happening again.

In flea markets, along with the books I’ve displayed some real junk, some things that can only be of any use to people who want to use them in some sort of artwork. One of a pair of doll-sized shoes. Broken links of chain. In flea markets you display things like that, and people are more likely to buy them than they are to buy new clothes or valuable books, because despite its posh Paris connotation the term “flea market” still suggests “flea-bitten” old junk. In bookstores, that sort of junk does not belong. What other things besides books do belong would depend on the kind of space I get. I’ve worked out floor plans for different buildings. I don’t think it’s useful to spend much time refining those plans until I’ve leased or bought a building.

When I think of "upscale" I think seriously "upscale." I think Embassy Row. That level of "upscale" is very seldom seen in Gate City. I've lived and worked and shopped with them, and I know they do buy books. Old crumbling ones as well as shiny new ones. They judge new acquaintances by the bookshelves in those acquaintances' front rooms, and nobody's ever accused me of not having an interesting collection/ I can make a bookstore interesting to the embassy crowd, no fear. The challenge is to keep it real enough to interest that hypothetical upwardly mobile coal miner.

You can tell something about who I am and what I think a good store ought to be from my knitwear display. Obviously in summer I like to knit with cotton, which moves faster than any other material, and in winter, like all knitters, a good natural wool with more natural lanolin than yucky acid in it. A lot of people are allergic to the chemicals in commercial wool yarn and fabric; very few are allergic to natural wool itself. I like mohair; the sweater I wear in an open-air market on a really cold day is mohair. I like alpaca. I always have things for people who want to have, and care for, beautiful natural materials, which are naturally expensive. Even silk—I’m not wild about silk, but I did knit a silk-mix jacket that sold for $850. And then there’s the student or working mother who wants to run their clothes through the washing and drying machines. Maybe I’m especially sympathetic to that end of the market because one of the first people I knitted for was a woman with cerebral palsy, who was just chuffed about having a wheelchair-accessible house where she could roll down the corridor to the laundry and pitch things into the machines. And when I plan a display to last for more than a few hours, I just classify them loosely by color “season” and put the expensive stuff in among the cheap stuff, which actually happens to be one way to discourage the process of biodegradation in those expensive natural materials.

I have nothing against rich people. Nothing against famous people, either, for that matter. I’ve worked with some of both. Tried to get them to come to Gate City, and they wouldn’t. Between money snobs and people with no money I’ll take the people with no money, any day. Kingsport wanted to attract billionnaires and then somehow got sucked into this scheme for plunking a slum right into the middle of what was meant to be the nicest part of that town. I’ll take a warning from Kingsport. If rich people want to come here, they’re welcome, and if they’d rather be somewhere else, that’s also fine. I don’t want to do anything to try to attract rich people, as such. Even the rich people hate that.

I think there are things stores can do to set the right sort of mood and attract the right sort of shoppers. Storekeepers can legitimately want to discourage some behavior--drunkenness, e.g., and shoplifting. One good way to do that is to make a store friendly to introverts, who are naturally predisposed to behave better in public than extroverts might want to do. Books tend to attract people who are sober and honest, and also soft-spoken, averse to gossip, and attracted to the idea of shopping mindfully in order to encourage good and discourage bad business practices. Book people are prone to outbursts of "Let's pump some money into this small town" syndrome. Bookstores automatically select for that approach to shopping because people who don't want to encourage writers and booksellers can always find something to read at a public library. 

Convenience stores don't have that option. By definition they offer the lowest-common-denominator sort of merchandise. Nevertheless,

(1) If they took over a store from a Nasty O'Meany who sent social cats to an animal shelter, they can change all the signage and, you know, tastefully call attention to how different they are in every way. 

(2) They can be very, very, very respectful of customers. Working-class people who have nothing to be ashamed of don't snarl if they're addressed as "Sir," but trashy people who are there to try to steal things might.

(3) They can maintain a good healthy distance among people, and between shelves and racks, too,

(4) They can keep their store painfully clean. 

(5) Very soft, all-instrumental background music--"chambermusic"--is posher than pop songs. No background music at all is posher still.

And if I were managing a convenience store, I think I'd try to bring in something quirky and unexpected every day. Convenience stores have to sell some standard items like antifreeze, personal hygiene and first-aid items, mosquito repellent, cigarettes, candy, soda pop, chips, and sunblock. Addingtons at least try to keep a few apples, oranges, and bananas near the cash register, which would not have been a bad idea for Mrs. Newby. I'd at least try displaying pepitas, or Boca Burgers, or maybe Fidget Spinners. For one thing the novelty item gives people something to chatter about other than gossip, and for another thing it signals that some of the people who come into the store are likely to have seen and bought and used something with which the local welfare class are not acquainted.