The End of an Era
What follows is a recent history of Cali Feed. It’s actually pretty interesting in a horrifying way. The long and short of it is: I was hired, Betty got fired, Angie is bad news, I’m moving on.
Back in September of 2004, after 2 months of anxiety-free unemployment, I heard the starting gun (in the form of my father's stern reprimands) and went on a job-hunting rampage, only to find that most of the jobs out there were taken. I ended up getting my only offer from a Feed store close to my parents house called Cali Feed and Pet Supply. Here's what I posted about it the day before I started working there:
"Anyhow they hired me. It seems like a great environment to work in though, and they give good benefits after 3 months. So yeah. pet food. as in bulk pet food. 50 pound bags of corn, oats, and barley."
If only I had known...
It wasn't immediately obvious to me that there was something weird going on there, but after about a month or two I had become aware that there were some tensions between some the big-wigs... if you can have a big wig in a pet food store. After 3 months, when I got my first performance-review/raise, I was pretty surprised by how little the review was based on. For one thing, Angie, the HR manager, lauded me for my promptness even though I'd been up to 5 minutes late to work almost every day for the last week. But in a more general sense, It occurred to me that she spends 95% of her time in her office while I spend 95% of my time on the sales floor, and yet she has a list of things I'm doing well on, or only ok on, and a couple things I need to work on, and it all seems pretty arbitrary, and I wonder how she comes up with it.
Also, she had failed to do anything with a time-off request for that I handed in over a month ahead of the deadline (two-weeks before first day requested off), and I didn't realize until a couple weeks before I had to leave on vacation that my request was still in her box waiting to be looked at. The problem was quickly solved by the weekend manager Christie (very cool) who incidentally quit in a huff only a month or so later.
So by this time, I'd pretty much lost respect for Angie. She seemed pretty clearly incompetent, but harmless more or less.
So I kept on without much desire to go out and look for work again, glad that the irritating Angie and I only had to cross paths once or twice a day, and that most of the time, when it wasn't busy, I could chat with my amicable coworkers or hang out in the back with the incomparable Betty.
Now Betty should have been mentioned earlier since her role at Cali Feed started over 30 years ago when she was a youngish single mom with a sincere love for animals and a tenacity few can match. Betty was raised in Santa Cruz in the 40s and 50s below the poverty level. Well below it. In high school and college she would find herself on trips, sponsored by organizations whose purpose is getting low income kids into a new and educational settings, where she would be the only white kid in a sea of black inner city kids from places like New York and Chicago. Her family actually raised livestock because it was cheaper to get meat that way (they had a little land). Thus her understanding of animals was not limited to cats and dogs but she knew how to deal with chickens, hogs, and hosses. This made her well suited to work in the store that supplied the more agrarian parts of Santa Cruz with their necessary hay bales.
Betty was sort a freak, to put it bluntly. She never seems to have made much effort to fit into social expectations. Her cloths tend to be dirty and ratty, her hair in tangles, and her speech blunt. In high school, she never lost any weight to athletics but she was by no means weak. She rode her bike all over town and sometimes rode it clear to San Jose (note: this means going over a mountain about 1000 feet in elevation. the trip takes about 45 minutes in a car). Decades later, she got a bunch of coworkers to bet she couldn’t do a back-somersault -- imagine their surprise when over 300 pounds of her did just that. When some guy tried to rape her in college, she literally threw him out into the street.
Betty is not a petite lady in figure or speech. She is blunt, stubborn, and frequently outright rude. But if you talk to her long enough, you'll realize that for all her edges, she is essentially a walking encyclopedia. Apart from seemingly endless knowledge about pet and livestock care (not trained as a vet though), she is also filled with humorous stories and anecdotes which she likes to tell. Frequently.
On top of this, she has proudly read an impressive catalog of books, and has an astute grasp of politics, history, and business, in spite of the fact that she never went to college. In short she's large, opinionated, and once you've met her, she's hard to forget.
In the 30 years Betty worked for Cali Feed, she slowly took on more and more responsibilities and eventually found herself the general manager. Roughly a year before I started there, she literally did everything. She did the bookkeeping, the payroll, HR, ordering, receiving, and still found time to come up to the front and talk with customers -- particularly those with questions no one else in the store could answer. Understandably she felt a little overworked, and asked the Son of her old Boss, Mr. Steve Cali (grandson of the original founder) if she could have an assistant. Betty preferred the ordering/receiving end, so the company hired someone from the outside (i.e. not a promotion) to handle the books and the payroll, and the hiring and firing.
That someone was Angie. When I was hired there, she had been there less than 6 months and was already having trouble covering up her hatred for Betty.
Sometime in early February, Angie took everyone by surprise and fired Saul. Saul had worked there over 15 years and was closest to Betty in Knowledge and Skill. And since he didn't have to take a cigarette break every 15 minutes, he was arguably the hardest and most effective worker there. In fact it was pretty obvious that he was. It may or may not have been relevant that it was also pretty obvious that he was not just gay, but a transvestite-by-night. In any case he was fired for "Continued poor performance."
The most likely cause of his "poor performance" was that he was having to work his butt off because Betty was out sick. His only guidance was Angie, whose directives didn't make sense (they almost never do), and so he ordered things as he knew best, based on what he'd learned from years of working at Betty's ample side.
In fact his dismissal was so bizarre that one of my coworkers jokingly asked Angie "So Betty's next right?" To which she replied "Oh no! Don't be ridiculous!"
So it was a shock to all of us when, about a week later, Angie fired Betty, who was still out sick. We were all wondering what she was thinking, especially since at this point, it was pretty clear to us that Angie was incapable of doing her own job, much less taking on the job of a person with 30 more years of experience whose primary helper she'd just fired as well, without seeming to remember that she was hired to be another helper for Betty in the first place.
This is when Christie, whom I mentioned earlier, quit in a huff.
This is also when I shook off the months of quiet apathy, and started looking for a new job with all my free time. Even on my 15 minute breaks, I was going online and looking at the online listings.
Everyone started talking about it and they haven’t stopped. The three main topics since then among the retail crew have been: 1. Who'll get fired next? 2. Who'll quit next? and 3. How much more will Angie screw things up?
Even Brook, who got hired after all this had happened, started looking for work after only a few weeks on the job. If Angie's primary goal was to produce a listless, unmotivated, and uncooperative staff, she can hardly have chosen a better way. The continuing irony is that she was hired because she apparently had great people skills -- she certainly wasn't hired for her business acumen...
After getting Betty out of the way, she started making plans. Big plans. She wants to turn Cali Feed, which has sold livestock feed for over 80 years, into a high end frou-frou dog-and-cat store, not because there is a lack of livestock customers - there’s not - but because she doesn’t like “feed.” Without anywhere near an adequate warning to customers, she discontinued all livestock products. Some days almost a third of the customers I see ask for something and I have to tell them that it's been discontinued. There have been a lot of irritated faces. The only other feed supply store in town has already noticed a jump in business. Also, she's discontinuing all the lower end dog-and-cat foods, and much of the lower ends supplies (like shampoos, brushes, etc.). Coming to replace them are expensive and stylish products that few customers seem interested in. There may be a market for this stuff in Santa Cruz, but you'd only really need about a thousand square feet to sell it in. Which leads me to the final stage of her plans: to do an extensive remodel, using all the space previously taken up by the hay and feeds, and convert it to retail space. Probably over 10,000 square feet devoted to over-priced nick-knackery for spoiled dogs that most people in Santa Cruz couldn't afford even if they wanted it. The business will then operate under the new name of Whole Pets. Not a little derivative, if you ask me, of the similarly overpriced and yuppified grocery store chain.
On top of all this, there is a continuing drama concerning faulty W2 forms. In the last days of January, someone reminded Angie that we needed our W2s, at which point it became apparent that she had completely forgotten about them. We got them only a few days late, only to be told days later that they were all incorrect, and had to wait for new ones. The new ones never came. They still haven't. At this point it seems like what must have happened is that Angie somehow deleted the first three quarters of records and lacked the wherewithal to pick up the phone and call in the computer specialist to get back that missing data. I doubt those W2s will ever turn up. Not surprisingly, She continues to place all the blame of the company she outsourced the payroll to. Could it be a coincidence that she outsourced to them at the beginning of the fourth quarter? possibly, but given that, it makes it hard to see how they can be at fault for the first 3 quarters when they weren't involved...
So it's no surprise really, that some people are questioning how much longer Cali Feed will stay in business. I, among others, wouldn't be very surprised if Angie turned out to be the ruin of a long-establish family run business. On the other hand, she may not be, in which case, she will be the ever hated manager of a store whose main business comes from uninformed customers whose sense of civic pride keeps them shopping at "family owned" stores even though they find the prices steep.
But soon I will leave it all behind, and good riddance. It's time for the next chapter. And the title of that chapter will be "Health Insurance"
Back in September of 2004, after 2 months of anxiety-free unemployment, I heard the starting gun (in the form of my father's stern reprimands) and went on a job-hunting rampage, only to find that most of the jobs out there were taken. I ended up getting my only offer from a Feed store close to my parents house called Cali Feed and Pet Supply. Here's what I posted about it the day before I started working there:
"Anyhow they hired me. It seems like a great environment to work in though, and they give good benefits after 3 months. So yeah. pet food. as in bulk pet food. 50 pound bags of corn, oats, and barley."
If only I had known...
It wasn't immediately obvious to me that there was something weird going on there, but after about a month or two I had become aware that there were some tensions between some the big-wigs... if you can have a big wig in a pet food store. After 3 months, when I got my first performance-review/raise, I was pretty surprised by how little the review was based on. For one thing, Angie, the HR manager, lauded me for my promptness even though I'd been up to 5 minutes late to work almost every day for the last week. But in a more general sense, It occurred to me that she spends 95% of her time in her office while I spend 95% of my time on the sales floor, and yet she has a list of things I'm doing well on, or only ok on, and a couple things I need to work on, and it all seems pretty arbitrary, and I wonder how she comes up with it.
Also, she had failed to do anything with a time-off request for that I handed in over a month ahead of the deadline (two-weeks before first day requested off), and I didn't realize until a couple weeks before I had to leave on vacation that my request was still in her box waiting to be looked at. The problem was quickly solved by the weekend manager Christie (very cool) who incidentally quit in a huff only a month or so later.
So by this time, I'd pretty much lost respect for Angie. She seemed pretty clearly incompetent, but harmless more or less.
So I kept on without much desire to go out and look for work again, glad that the irritating Angie and I only had to cross paths once or twice a day, and that most of the time, when it wasn't busy, I could chat with my amicable coworkers or hang out in the back with the incomparable Betty.
Now Betty should have been mentioned earlier since her role at Cali Feed started over 30 years ago when she was a youngish single mom with a sincere love for animals and a tenacity few can match. Betty was raised in Santa Cruz in the 40s and 50s below the poverty level. Well below it. In high school and college she would find herself on trips, sponsored by organizations whose purpose is getting low income kids into a new and educational settings, where she would be the only white kid in a sea of black inner city kids from places like New York and Chicago. Her family actually raised livestock because it was cheaper to get meat that way (they had a little land). Thus her understanding of animals was not limited to cats and dogs but she knew how to deal with chickens, hogs, and hosses. This made her well suited to work in the store that supplied the more agrarian parts of Santa Cruz with their necessary hay bales.
Betty was sort a freak, to put it bluntly. She never seems to have made much effort to fit into social expectations. Her cloths tend to be dirty and ratty, her hair in tangles, and her speech blunt. In high school, she never lost any weight to athletics but she was by no means weak. She rode her bike all over town and sometimes rode it clear to San Jose (note: this means going over a mountain about 1000 feet in elevation. the trip takes about 45 minutes in a car). Decades later, she got a bunch of coworkers to bet she couldn’t do a back-somersault -- imagine their surprise when over 300 pounds of her did just that. When some guy tried to rape her in college, she literally threw him out into the street.
Betty is not a petite lady in figure or speech. She is blunt, stubborn, and frequently outright rude. But if you talk to her long enough, you'll realize that for all her edges, she is essentially a walking encyclopedia. Apart from seemingly endless knowledge about pet and livestock care (not trained as a vet though), she is also filled with humorous stories and anecdotes which she likes to tell. Frequently.
On top of this, she has proudly read an impressive catalog of books, and has an astute grasp of politics, history, and business, in spite of the fact that she never went to college. In short she's large, opinionated, and once you've met her, she's hard to forget.
In the 30 years Betty worked for Cali Feed, she slowly took on more and more responsibilities and eventually found herself the general manager. Roughly a year before I started there, she literally did everything. She did the bookkeeping, the payroll, HR, ordering, receiving, and still found time to come up to the front and talk with customers -- particularly those with questions no one else in the store could answer. Understandably she felt a little overworked, and asked the Son of her old Boss, Mr. Steve Cali (grandson of the original founder) if she could have an assistant. Betty preferred the ordering/receiving end, so the company hired someone from the outside (i.e. not a promotion) to handle the books and the payroll, and the hiring and firing.
That someone was Angie. When I was hired there, she had been there less than 6 months and was already having trouble covering up her hatred for Betty.
Sometime in early February, Angie took everyone by surprise and fired Saul. Saul had worked there over 15 years and was closest to Betty in Knowledge and Skill. And since he didn't have to take a cigarette break every 15 minutes, he was arguably the hardest and most effective worker there. In fact it was pretty obvious that he was. It may or may not have been relevant that it was also pretty obvious that he was not just gay, but a transvestite-by-night. In any case he was fired for "Continued poor performance."
The most likely cause of his "poor performance" was that he was having to work his butt off because Betty was out sick. His only guidance was Angie, whose directives didn't make sense (they almost never do), and so he ordered things as he knew best, based on what he'd learned from years of working at Betty's ample side.
In fact his dismissal was so bizarre that one of my coworkers jokingly asked Angie "So Betty's next right?" To which she replied "Oh no! Don't be ridiculous!"
So it was a shock to all of us when, about a week later, Angie fired Betty, who was still out sick. We were all wondering what she was thinking, especially since at this point, it was pretty clear to us that Angie was incapable of doing her own job, much less taking on the job of a person with 30 more years of experience whose primary helper she'd just fired as well, without seeming to remember that she was hired to be another helper for Betty in the first place.
This is when Christie, whom I mentioned earlier, quit in a huff.
This is also when I shook off the months of quiet apathy, and started looking for a new job with all my free time. Even on my 15 minute breaks, I was going online and looking at the online listings.
Everyone started talking about it and they haven’t stopped. The three main topics since then among the retail crew have been: 1. Who'll get fired next? 2. Who'll quit next? and 3. How much more will Angie screw things up?
Even Brook, who got hired after all this had happened, started looking for work after only a few weeks on the job. If Angie's primary goal was to produce a listless, unmotivated, and uncooperative staff, she can hardly have chosen a better way. The continuing irony is that she was hired because she apparently had great people skills -- she certainly wasn't hired for her business acumen...
After getting Betty out of the way, she started making plans. Big plans. She wants to turn Cali Feed, which has sold livestock feed for over 80 years, into a high end frou-frou dog-and-cat store, not because there is a lack of livestock customers - there’s not - but because she doesn’t like “feed.” Without anywhere near an adequate warning to customers, she discontinued all livestock products. Some days almost a third of the customers I see ask for something and I have to tell them that it's been discontinued. There have been a lot of irritated faces. The only other feed supply store in town has already noticed a jump in business. Also, she's discontinuing all the lower end dog-and-cat foods, and much of the lower ends supplies (like shampoos, brushes, etc.). Coming to replace them are expensive and stylish products that few customers seem interested in. There may be a market for this stuff in Santa Cruz, but you'd only really need about a thousand square feet to sell it in. Which leads me to the final stage of her plans: to do an extensive remodel, using all the space previously taken up by the hay and feeds, and convert it to retail space. Probably over 10,000 square feet devoted to over-priced nick-knackery for spoiled dogs that most people in Santa Cruz couldn't afford even if they wanted it. The business will then operate under the new name of Whole Pets. Not a little derivative, if you ask me, of the similarly overpriced and yuppified grocery store chain.
On top of all this, there is a continuing drama concerning faulty W2 forms. In the last days of January, someone reminded Angie that we needed our W2s, at which point it became apparent that she had completely forgotten about them. We got them only a few days late, only to be told days later that they were all incorrect, and had to wait for new ones. The new ones never came. They still haven't. At this point it seems like what must have happened is that Angie somehow deleted the first three quarters of records and lacked the wherewithal to pick up the phone and call in the computer specialist to get back that missing data. I doubt those W2s will ever turn up. Not surprisingly, She continues to place all the blame of the company she outsourced the payroll to. Could it be a coincidence that she outsourced to them at the beginning of the fourth quarter? possibly, but given that, it makes it hard to see how they can be at fault for the first 3 quarters when they weren't involved...
So it's no surprise really, that some people are questioning how much longer Cali Feed will stay in business. I, among others, wouldn't be very surprised if Angie turned out to be the ruin of a long-establish family run business. On the other hand, she may not be, in which case, she will be the ever hated manager of a store whose main business comes from uninformed customers whose sense of civic pride keeps them shopping at "family owned" stores even though they find the prices steep.
But soon I will leave it all behind, and good riddance. It's time for the next chapter. And the title of that chapter will be "Health Insurance"