Some weeks ago, I told you about my brief experience as a furniture stock boy and subsequent move to a retail auto parts store. That story brought a surprising number of email responses (feel free to comment on the actual blog!) and it also conjured up a few more memories related to that job that you might find entertaining. You decide…

The Auto Store job was a great part-time gig because I could work some nights for a few hours after school, then Saturdays. I would also work during school breaks and summers for a few years into college. The store was run by a wizened gentleman named Sy who had been in retail his whole adult life. He was used to long hours, weekend and holiday work. In my mind, he had led a tough life. I remember vividly how he would walk me through the paperwork to be done at the store with arthritis-ravaged gnarled hands and fingers. He was a sweet guy but didn’t like to show it. Sy was the manager for 3 stores and once he learned that he could trust me, I didn’t see him all that much. He taught me to open the store, use the safe, do the closing paperwork, and even handle the bank drop.

One busy Saturday Sy went to lunch and left me with the store. Picture the store as a typical strip mall affair; long and narrow with 3 aisles; similar to this picture. For some odd reason, the cash register/checkout was set in the middle of the store along one of the walls, making it difficult to see the entrance, except through the large convex mirror mounted over the door. After Sy came back from lunch he called me to the front where he had piled up a few items he had ‘stolen’ from the endcaps near the entrance of the store.  He admonished me about keeping a better eye out for thieves.  I accepted the scolding without argument, but being the wise-ass that I am, I had a plan, and you probably know what it was. During my lunch that day I ended up filling the entrance with items taken from all around the store, even beyond where Sy was perched in the middle of the store. An impressive array of tires, batteries, additives, and accessories filled the entrance. I almost blew it with my sniggering as I corralled big stuff right under Sy’s nose. When beckoned to the front, Sy knew exactly what to expect. He just looked at me and said, “Help me move the checkout.” The cash register and checkout area were moved that day to their proper place at the front of the store. Another personal value: Never ask someone to do something that you would (could) not do yourself.

Now Sy’s stores were not particularly successful. In fact, I often wondered how they were surviving. Due to the ancient cash register we were using, it was clear that there was no real-time inventory system in place. 

Merchandise was replenished by taking a physical inventory every other week. Unless some very fancy analysis was being done somewhere in the corporate offices, there was little chance that one could accurately determine store profitability, at least not in the short term. Sy essentially verified this by always focusing on total sales dollars and never on margin. And we had a fully working garage attached with a full-time mechanic who was never busy because Sy rarely sold services, and even seemed to avoid them.

One summer Sy was extremely concerned that they were going to shut down our store due to low sales. I implored him to run some specials and to really sell the services. He was a faithful rule-follower, as he should have been, so would only run the sales that home office advertised. I, on the other hand, must be part pirate because I have always believed that rules are more like guidelines. It was obvious that the system in place did not really track product to price so when I worked, I would hold ‘Sales’. One popular one: If your register subtotal ended in an odd number, you could purchase an odd number of STP additives (a very popular oil additive of dubious value) for half price (.99). Even total; even number of bottles. People loved it. It was kind of a game and they bought like crazy, even those who didn’t know what the hell STP was. We ran out of the product almost every week. It was my first inkling of the fact that many people will buy anything, anything, if they feel they are getting a great deal.

So during the summer of my junior year in High School, Sy finally takes a week-long vacation. I had never seen him do that because he ran the stores like they were his own, and he just didn’t have that many trustworthy workers. Until me. I told him that we would double sales while he was gone. Understand that he did not see this as a threat to his position. He encouraged me, but didn’t ask how I was going to do it; he just wanted our sales to grow so they’d keep the store open.

It was one awesome week. I bought balloons and streamers, and we decorated the store. We slashed prices on all services.

[I should stop here to tell you about our mechanic, Hector. He stood 5 feet tall on a good day and had a severe congenital limp with one shortened leg and a foot turned out about 45 degrees. Every day, he dutifully wore his oversized dark blue one-piece mechanics uniform and was of unknown (to me) national origin. Looking back, I can’t believe I never asked, but he might have been Jamaican with such a heavy accent. He would often say to me “Fren-ghi, sun tines I feel your nuts.” And I would always tell him that, especially in front of customers, it’s “Frankie, sometimes I THINK you are nuts.”]

Anyway, Hector loved our ‘Vacation Sale’ because he actually got to do something. Free mounting and alignment with 4 tires, which were also on sale. Shocks; buy 2, get 2. Slashed prices on batteries, alternators, EVERYTHING that he touched. And of course, we had product sales. A lot of ‘combo’ sales: Buy 4 quarts of oil, get a free oil filter. Buy a set of spark plug wires, get a free tune-up kit. That sort of thing. Now, I realize this all sounds terrible, and it may be: I was changing the price structure in a chain store on my own and cutting significantly into profit. But here’s the thing; I just finished my junior year in high school, on summer break working for a company that was obviously mismanaged and failing before my eyes. I rationalized that by generating significant sales I could help my friend Sy move some product, generate at least some profit, and save his store. And the service dollars were almost all profit. Lastly, and importantly for me back then, we were having a blast. The other two guys who worked there were really getting into the spirit and started generating their own sales; but I had to reel them in when they would get carried away. I did have boundaries after all!

We more than doubled sales that week. Sy came back and saw the numbers before I could tell him. He told me the numbers (as if I didn’t know them) and just asked: “So, how did you do it?”  I told him we had a few ‘green light specials’ but mostly we sold services hard. He just smiled, and we never talked about it again. It was really strange. I knew he was happy because it bought the store some time, but he had no interest in replicating our success. I still don’t know why. Less than a year later, they did close that Massapequa store and gave Sy another one out in Riverhead, NY, an hour drive one-way for Sy.

That summer I worked at the Riverhead store with him and he gave me a ride both ways (although I drove home while he slept). At the end of the summer, Sy dropped me off at my house and handed me a wrapped gift as a graduation/going-off-to-college gift. It was an engraved 14 KT gold-filled pen and mechanical pencil set from Cross. Back then Cross was the Mont Blanc of writing instruments and their products were available only at jewelry stores. I was so touched that this hard-working old man would give me such a thoughtful, expensive gift. For many reasons, I never used them, and to this day, some 45 years later, I still have them in their original case in my desk drawer.

The power of a thoughtful gift, encouraging words, or a pat on the back for a job well done, right?

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