Sometimes it’s all about the numbers!

Many folks worry about how many members we have, or the size of our collection. Still more expect to see monthly conversions, as regular as clockwork. While those numbers are interesting, I’m thinking today about those little black add numbers you see on signs in stores.

You know, like at Walmart were the yellow ball guy comes and rolls them back. This story is really about Kmart, though. There was a downturn in the economy while I was living in Denver, and the construction business dried up. Being a drywaller, that’s pretty hard to take. Instead of looking for unemployment checks, I found myself another job. Down the road from where I lived there used to be a pasture but now it had a paved parking lot and a poured foundation. A brand new Kmart was going up. Every day for weeks I would go by and see if they were hiring yet. Eventually because of my nagging they hired me to run errands for them, then as a regular Kmart employee. Since they had no computers or any accounting set up, they didn’t know what employee number to give me so they gave me #1. Once the store got under way, it turned out I got to keep it. Instead of hearing “associated 5250 to the checkout” they called for “employee #1” and lots of heads would turn to see who rated such an honor. But those aren’t the numbers I was interested in talking about.

My first day at work was funny, too. We had orientation, and one of the things they told us was we always got our birthday off from work, with pay. It was the only day we got off with pay, not even Christmas. And yes, that first day of work was my birthday; when they found out I was sent home with pay. <smile!>

Since I was there before anything was – no registers, racks, merchandise, etc, I got the experience of seeing it all come in. One of the things that arrived at the new store was a HUGE box of numbers on sticky tape – add numbers. My boss told me to take one package of each size and each number and put it on a tray. Since there were scores and scores of extras, I didn’t see why we needed to do that, and he even locked it up each night in his locker! But it wasn’t long before there wasn’t a number to be had in all the store. I don’t know where they all went, but soon a new add flyer would come out and we’d need to put up signs in each department and no one seemed to have any numbers – except us.

Now, you would think that was pretty smart but my boss almost got fired for that. Another department was jealous of how easy things were for us, how we were always ready each week to put out the new signs and had plenty of numbers to spare. I know for a fact my boss told the other boss he should make his own tray of numbers before they all disappeared, but he scoffed at the idea until it was too late. My boss tried to share once, but the other guy kept a bunch of numbers so my boss cut him off. Once they ran out they started complaining about us, and soon the store manager was all over my boss about it and the “problem” was solved by giving our numbers out to everyone else.

Well, you know what happened. Not a week later, no more numbers. Our store manager was furious that no one was ready for the sales, that we had to try to peel and re-stick old numbers, etc. But stories like this often have a strange twist. Our district manager came to see why our sales were bad and saw our ugly, cobbled together add signs. He heard our silly story of woe. And then he fired our store manager. It turns out he felt my boss should have been rewarded for his right thinking, not punished. It seemed like a silly thing to fire someone for – just a bunch of sticky black numbers.

But on the surface of things, sometimes life is silly, like when 5 young ladies get locked out of a wedding because they didn’t happen to have any oil. It’s just oil! Look a little deeper, and suddenly its as silly as folks trying to get into heaven without doing anything in their lives to prepare for it first. Why do people do this? It just doesn’t “add” up! <smile!>

Randy