Jason McGathey

In which a parent mandated trip to the DMV, without my prescription eyeglasses, pretty much goes as I'd feared it would.

Well, the book is finally out, and like a proud papa, I couldn’t be happier! This is the first time I ever tried an actual semi-legit, planned out release strategy, i.e. scheduling it 3 months in advance and promoting the thing for a change. I’m not sure this worked any better, but it certainly  feels  less half baked, as opposed to the usual tactics of dropping these things into the void, with no...

Print book now available! Get it on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CQRQ6BJK

Edgar wouldn’t say he’s gotten to know Christie extremely well just yet. They are on friendly enough terms, however, to chat briefly in passing about even non-business related matters. Or for him to become her desperation last resort when, as the day of an event at Liberty Avenue approaches, to ask if it might be possible for him to man the grill. You can read the individual chapters on Amazon, to...

Even though rumors are swirling that Palmyra’s butcher, Nick, is on the hot seat, for some reason they hire one of his closest friends, Scott, as Southside’s meat cutter. Nick has been talking him up for months and they finally decided to pull the trigger on the guy.             Part of the wait is that he was only recently released from prison. And the morning that he starts, Dale, Craig and Edga...

The fourth column in the new items spreadsheet is dedicated to brand name. A seemingly straightforward concept which is nonetheless much more labor intensive than he ever would have guessed. Having uniform brand names for every product in a line is a huge help, for searching items in the system, for setting the sale prices in advance of their weekly flyers. But it’s the kind of thing that must be...

“He’s almost eighty now, but he’s got a mind like a calculator ,” Duane tells Edgar, en route to the Bellwether Snacks headquarters, “and he still works, too: two days a week, like clockwork. You can count on it.” This trip across town was Duane’s idea. He’d stuck his head into Edgar’s office and said he was cruising over to corporate, suggested this ride along. It was intended as a rapport buildi...

Though its weekly sales amount to roughly half of what each of the other two are pulling in, one oddly colored feather in Liberty’s cap is that it is nonetheless the most profitable store. Palmyra and Southside both appear to be rising ships, with slow and steady upticks in volume, but money is continually poured into each in the name of various improvements. Whereas, apart from utilities and its...

One of Teri’s first key lessons for him concerns the addition of new items to their computer system. Months earlier, when they first began installing this Orchestra software, she arranged a blank Excel template twelve columns wide, sent this to all department managers, merchandisers, and store managers. It’s fairly self-explanatory, and she is adamant that if anyone wants a new item added to the s...

Both in size and appearance, Liberty Avenue more closely resembles your average, single proprietor owned, charming little convenience store more than it does an all-natural market. And moving in the complete opposite direction as its Southside cousin across town, this location finds itself situated in a once thriving district which has now fallen seriously out of favor. In a non-GMO nutshell, what...

Southside opened almost exactly three years ago, and is without question the current prize jewel of this operation. The previous occupant was apparently a Harris Teeter where, reputable sources insist, a store manager was shot to death in his office. Bellwether Snacks/Healthy Hippie Market were subsequently able to lease it for a song, though not so much because of this shooting, rather that at th...

The job sounds straightforward enough. They are a tiny chain of three retail outlets, specializing in natural and locally sourced products, for health minded individuals. Though Bellwether Snacks owns them, these stores have relatively complete autonomy, so long as they are profitable. Healthy Hippie Market doesn’t really have its own accounting department, and nobody inside the stores in this rol...

Everything was cool up until the summer that Liberty Avenue closed. More specifically the morning where it first occurred to many of them that maybe this company was no longer on the upswing. Their acting owner has just called a meeting, to announce the shuttering of their original location, which somehow endured in this town, in a beleaguered, not exactly great spot, from the late 1970s up until...

The structure of the deli here is unique as far as grocery stores are concerned, and each of the stores in turn remains totally different. Beyond pitching in a little to get Walnut up and running, for example, there’s almost no need for Christie to make that hour drive once a week, and she’s mostly exempted from the one-day-a-week edict. Southside continues to try and wrap the department manager a...

Though Craig Willis was able to successfully deflect Pierre’s attempts at forcing him to work weekends, he is nonetheless cajoled into driving up to Palmyra and helping that grocery department, for one full day, at time and a half. He returns to Southside the following Monday, flopping into Edgar’s “therapy patient” chair to relate his findings.             “Man, I think out of  everybody  working...

They begin moving into the Walnut location on the first, which gives them a month to get this operation up and running. Under normal circumstances, this would be nowhere near enough time, but unlike the last store opening – Southside, some seven years ago – occupying a corner space of this indoor market, the infrastructure’s in place, the permits needed minimal. Also, though a highly controversial...

As they begin moving into the Walnut location, it makes perfect sense to roll this into a company-wide rearrangement. Palmyra’s produce manager, Johnny, has requested a transfer to work in Walnut, as he lives nearer there, and some laidback, seemingly rational and middle aged mom type, Charlene, is hired to fill his former post. Meanwhile, a basically sweet but grouchiness-projecting older in woma...

The little blurb people put beside their name in Twitter is usually far more comical than anything they ever post. This is one thing Jack Lincoln has noticed, scrolling through that social media time suck in his down time. But then again, these sites all have their winning attributes. With LinkedIn, he likes the mayhem of their connection suggestions. At the top of their endless doom scroll, the f...

Well okay, now she has officially seen just about everything. As Glenda Jackson is opening the latest manila folder from Liberty Avenue, what tumbles out is not only the expected modest stack of invoices, but also a clipped together bundle of…word search answers? From the latest Healthy Shopper Market newsletter? Yes. Along with a little post-it note atop these, which reads,  LIBERTY’S PUZZLES! Em...

Some conspiracy theory type cashier, a thirtysomething dude that’s been with the company for maybe three weeks, sticks a post-it note to the monitor up in Palmyra’s office which reads,  Friends: be careful what you’re doing on here! “They” are watching!!  He has drawn some eyeballs up above the message, a set looking to the left, and another set looking to the right, while at the bottom, much as y...

It’s strange how certain topics get lofted into the air, and begin to catch fire due to their momentum, when you’ve mentioned your own recent preoccupation with them to no one. Of course, skeptics will claim that it’s only because you are currently paying attention to this subject, that these perceived coincidences do not exist. But while that’s certainly true to some extent, and while there are a...

Walnut is a city of approximately 40,000, located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. The interstate neatly cleaves into two distinct sections, one of which is modern and heavy with strip malls, the other considerably older, with very few developments over the past decade or two. The downtown proper is one mild exception, however, as things have slowly been on the upswing, with the addit...

Out here in the wild and woolly retail landscape, it’s often unclear whether keeping these incidents to oneself is the right thing to do. You could certainly advance a valid argument that sweeping something like this under the rug is not in the company’s best interests. Yet to run and complain to Duane about it wouldn’t really feel right, either, would leave Edgar feeling more like a third grade t...

This episode is also available as a blog post: https://jasonmcgathey.wordpress.com/2021/04/14/tales-of-a-scorched-coffee-pot-chapter-33/

This isn’t to suggest that Palmyra has cornered the market on personnel – or personality – struggles. Naturally, after months of relative calm, many of these bombshells just so happen to arrive during the busiest months of the year, when they can least afford to deal with such distractions. The first major bloodshed arrives when Aria is escorted off the premises by police. This move doesn’t just s...