Desperately Seeking Suck-Up

Visits from the corporate office are local retail managers’ optimal opportunity to show off how their store is on any typical day: pristine. Not just clean, but the kind of dramatic glow-up that can only come from an entire week of manic cleaning, frantic organizing, and the shirking of every regular staff duty that doesn’t help the twenty year-old store glimmer as if newly birthed from the retail mother god’s womb. But it’s not only the merchandise and fixtures that have to be perfectly aligned with the company’s vision, the staff chosen to be on the floor should reflect that as well. Finding the right workers for that role however may actually be the most difficult task when getting ready for a visit, and that’s saying something!

Lyle Phillips is a general manager for an All-In-One retail store in the San Francisco area. Recently he’s learned that an entourage from the corporate office would be visiting his store, and he and his management team intend to roll out the red carpet, so to speak.

“Make sure to specify we don’t actually have a red carpet,” says Phillips. “I want high expectations, but not that high, haha!”

“We’ve all been very hard at work to make this store worthy of our friends at corporate,” says sales manager Ethel Turner. “I mean, I had to pull the merchandisers off their regular duties this weekend to replace any worn displays, close down half the cash lanes so the cashiers could rebuild some old racking, and asked the overnight crew to sweep out and organize the loading dock before putting out the mountain of extra stock I ordered to make the aisles look positively bursting with product! We’re all exhausted but I’m told the sales floor looks amazing!”

“Yes, it’s amazing what you can do on a fully staffed weekend when you give the employees a bunch of extra tasks to do,” says staff planner Miguel Calderón, “and I’m very proud to say they got it all done in addition to their normal duties like the rock stars I always say they are!”

However, one major task remains that sadly cannot be delegated: Figuring out which staff members to schedule to put store #0094’s best foot forward.

“I asked all the department heads to give me their best and brightest,” says Phillips, “but not like the hardest workers or most senior employees. No, I’m looking for the ones who live the tenets of the All-In-One brand, the ones who not only work here but love every second of it!”

“Bootlickers,” clarifies head of the Kitchens department Vic Jacot. “He’s looking for workers who will lick corporate’s boots.”

As simple as it may seem to look at a roster of store employees and pick out the bootlickingest toadies to kiss the C-suite rings and wash executive feet, it now appears more daunting than it originally seemed.

“Oh, we’ve got a fair share of lifers,” says Calderón, “and employees who can recite the eight All-In-One values from memory. But finding people who would say with a smile how much they love working here and that we’re the best employer in the history of retail? Well, finding anyone even willing to come close to that ideal has been, well, let’s call it an unending nightmare of cratered morale.”

As it turns out, not many workers were interested in this prestigious assignment.

“I legit could not stop laughing when they asked me!” says Pat, a well-seasoned merchandiser. “They told us they wanted us all in the store entrance to clap when these clowns walked in. I said ‘Clap!? Are you serious!?’ and just about fell on the floor in a giggle fit. Funniest crap I ever heard!”

“Oh, I was all for it,” says Meredith, a sales lead from Yard & Garden. “I just couldn’t wait to ask how they justify cutting our hours, capping our raises at three percent, and leaving vacant positions empty while expecting more and more to get done. But it’s okay, I’ll just enjoy this extra day off since they asked me not to come in the day of the visit.”

“It’s too bad they didn’t ask me a couple of years ago,” says returns worker Yvette, “I’d have had lots to say about how great this store was and how much I loved working for All-In-One. But that was before they relaxed the return policy and then got mad because we took in more returns than the year before. I mean, if they’re gonna make dumbass decisions they should be prepared to hear about it from the people those dumbass decisions affect!”

Yvette was also asked not to come on that particular day off.

GM Lyle Phillips was taken aback by how few employees were willing to stand up and tell corporate how amazing working for All-In-One is. He even began throwing out names of people he knew for a fact genuinely loved their job.

“Oh, he named plenty of people,” tells Calderón. “Let’s see… There was Mariah G who left to take a similar but better-paying job down the street at the Costco. He also inquired about Peter D who walked out because his sales lead kept delegating tasks outside his job description and then wrote him up for neglecting his regular duties. And then Tricia P who got tired of waiting for a management position to open up and eventually found one somewhere else.”

“And then there was Francis,” adds Phillips himself. “That one really hurt.”

“Oh, Francis still works here,” says Calderón.

“Yeah,” says Phillips, “but he said he wasn’t interested in ‘smiling in the face of the oppressor just to prove I’ve swallowed all their shit’ as he puts it. I don’t even know him all that well, I just figured anyone named ‘Francis’ would be a born ass-kisser. Just go by ‘Frank’ if you’re going to have that kind of attitude!”

Phillips now finds himself reckoning with the stark realization that people do not enjoy working for the All-In-One location he leads as much as he thought they did. Or, like, at all.

“Doesn’t anybody want to stan this company anymore!?” he asks in frustration, probably rhetorically since it’s quite obvious that they do not. “We even have a big ‘welcome’ lunch for the visitors and our management team planned, and maybe we won’t be putting out the leftovers in the breakroom for the Tuesday afternoon staff to enjoy, see how they like that!”

“We’ll be fine,” says that Francis guy. “Last year all we got was a bowl of warm fruit salad, some portion cups of sliced pepperoncinis, and a squeeze bottle of horseradish sauce. Not exactly a square meal.”

Francis has since also been given the day of the visit off. Well, at least the day of the visit.

So how will Lyle Phillips’s lack of employees willing to enthusiastically suck up to their corporate overlords affect how said overlords view the store and its management? Only time will tell….

Update:

This past Tuesday, All-In-One store #0094 had their corporate visit and staff planner Miguel Calderón tells us how things went:

“Well, as you can probably imagine, we couldn’t find anyone willing to give our visitors the full royal treatment and had to settle for employees who were just not outwardly hostile towards the corporation and the ‘toxic capitalist system their greed helps perpetuate’. Those were Francis’s words, not mine. Also, we fired Francis and a lot of people were mad about it.

“Anyway, it actually went quite well! The corporate guys even complimented us on how lean our staffing seemed versus how great the store looked! They said we really set a standard here for how all stores should be able to perform on barely any workers! Anyway, can’t wait for the follow-up visit two months from now! Getting ready might be a chore since we’re not replacing Francis or any of the other people we lost this year, but I know we can do it! We got some real rock stars working here!”

We’re also told that said rock stars, despite Phillips’s threat, did get to enjoy a platter of room temperature ham and cheese croissant sandwiches (well, there were a couple cut into thin slices), a plate of the driest shortbread cookies you could possibly imagine, and a half-full tub of cream cheese garnished with bagel crumbs as a show of appreciation from management. Hopefully this grand gesture only solidifies the love these employees should have for their employer, a love they’ll be more than willing to share in two months when corporate visit time comes back around!