The Craft Store
There really isn’t much to do when you are unemployed. You look at the same jobs everyday—ones you applied to a of couple times and never heard a thing. You check your email and balance your checkbook, and maybe you do some cleaning if the depression over your financial situation hasn’t taken over your brain that day. Maybe you have a few side gigs that pay a few dollars, like writing or taking surveys. Really, you do a lot of thinking about everything.
I have had several jobs over the past few years, but there have only been three full-time positions. Three jobs that were supposed to help with financial security and allow us to pay off debt and maybe buy a house. Each of these jobs did not work out for their own reasons, and since I have revisited each in my mind numerous times, I know exactly why.
The first was my job as a craft store manager. The job was only part-time in the beginning—a closing supervisor at a nationwide craft store. This story is definitely told in detail in my book, The Fabric Manager: A Memoir of a Craft Store Manager, but I will give the basics in this post.
When I was offered the promotion to store manager, I hesitated, unsure if I was ready to manage again after my previous management position had nearly killed me. We know now that I likely had some sort of illness, whether Lyme disease that took a couple years to advance or something else entirely. I never did get a diagnosis either time I was severely ill, similar to the strange, unknown disease that hospitalized me when I was a small child.
I had two main questions when I was considering the craft store promotion: was there travel involved and how much did it pay. The pay was nothing but lies from a corporation and is detailed in my book, as is the travel, but travel is why I left.
I suffer from serious travel anxiety, so much so that I cannot drive. I do not feel safe in a vehicle of any kind and even a trip across town can stress me out. I was not willing to take the promotion if it involved travel beyond the one meeting a year the previous manager had to attend in a neighboring town. I figured I could handle that one eight-hour day, and since that was what I was told, I did eventually accept the position.
Almost right away the travel doubled from one district meeting to two and I regretted my decision to take the job. Granted, there were many reasons why I had regrets and not just travel, such as rebellious employees that I was not allowed to fire and an overwhelming workload that I was unaware of before becoming manager. Yes, we were financially stable at home—though corporate didn’t want to pay what I was told and tricked me into accepting a salary four thousand dollars lower than their own minimum range for managers, it was still enough to pay all the bills and afford a few luxuries. But what good is money and material possessions if one is miserable all the time?
I eventually accepted that I was stuck in that job and took command of my employees. Though some still fought against my leadership, many of them fell in line, willingly following someone who saw the value they brought to the team. I have always been a born leader—it’s who I am—and most people will follow someone who treats them as an equal or who appreciates all of the hard work they do throughout the day. I earned their respect by asking for their input and being flexible with their schedules. Most of my employees made around eight dollars an hour, hardly worth it in 2017, but they stayed because they wanted flexible hours or because they enjoyed their job. Later, some would stay because of me, and loyalty to me instead of the company made my boss unhappy, just as it did with my previous boss.
Though I had the support of much of my team, the corporate drones felt otherwise. I could never do anything right in my boss’s eyes, and my assistant manager often fought against any changes I attempted to make, or even ones that came down from corporate. After years of working for small businesses, I was in an entirely different world, and I hated it. I despised being part of a corporation who ignored input from employees and changed direction every month. It was like being on a ship with a dozen captains who all wanted to go a different direction.
There were times when my boss seemed to understand me, but mostly she treated me as if I were a child who had no idea what she was doing. When she wasn’t around, things went smoothly—my employees preferred my lenient attitude over a corporate drone, and that made them work harder. I ran the store my way, putting a twist on whatever corporate wanted to make it work for us. I brought the ideas of small business into a task-heavy corporate job, and I kept it hidden from upper management.
When my boss was there, my assistant manager would put on a false front, pretending to be pro-company, only to later complain to me about the way things were going. Her negative attitude often pulled me down, draining my energy and any hope for the job. I had too much respect for my boss to lie to her, so I maintained my normal attitude, even if that meant disagreeing with her. Sometimes she appreciated this, sometimes not.
Truthfully, I could see potential in my boss—if she had not decided to follow some corporate agenda, she could have been a great leader. She could have been her own boss and ran her own business. Perhaps that was just the personality she put forward. Toward the end of my career there, I could tell that she was starting to feel held back because she was a woman. No matter her reasoning for any of it, she eventually lost my respect through the way she treated me and some of my employees, and I no longer cared what she thought.
There were many incidents that led up to my final decision to leave: an ice storm where we were the only store still open in our shopping center, corporate taking away our music, and attitude over my total hysterectomy and recovery time. I started seriously applying to other jobs after a phone conversation from my boss—a conversation that was mostly her bullying me and me crying at my desk thanks to hormonal changes from surgical menopause. I knew then that I had to leave.
However, it was when corporate decided all managers would attend an overnight meeting in State College, Pennsylvania that sent me away. I was still dealing with some health issues from my hysterectomy—a surgery I opted to have to remove early uterine cancer and not to get a six week “vacation,” as my boss once uttered. As I always say, vacations do not start off with your uterus being ripped out through your vagina.
The news of the overnight meeting sent me into a panic attack. I quickly decided to accept the next job offer I received, no matter where. I had an upcoming interview with a local bank, and once they offered me the job, I took it, even though it paid much less than I was making. It also meant our dream of buying a home would come to an end, but I had to get out of that job. I could no longer mentally handle the bullying, the travel, or the long days without proper nutrition. I gave my one month’s notice and immediately felt relieved.
It was exceptionally good timing as the COVID-19 pandemic hit just after I gave my notice and I got to see the extremely dark side of the craft company. They ignored shutdown orders and forced employees to choose between working or termination. This was the early days when we didn’t know much about the virus and there was a lot of fear and chaos. Again, this is all detailed in my book, but I’ll just say that their actions said a lot about how little they valued their store employees. I was glad to be out of there.
