Part XIII - Grocery Guy

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 After working part-time at the Cornhusker Super Saver for around six months I noticed postings for management positions being posted in the break room. The plethora of opportunities was due to a new store opening at South 27th and Pine Lake Road. I decided to apply for the Grocery Manager slot at the 48th & O Super Saver. I thought my previous experience working as a manager at Food 4 Less and my recent time working on the Night Crew would help me get my foot in the door. I did indeed get my foot in the door and my foot stayed in the B&R Stores door, the parent company of Super Saver, for just under 17 years. 

I started as Grocery Manager for Store #4 of B&R Stores, the original Super Saver in August 1999. I got a little bit of training by Jeff, my predecessor. I came in at 6:00am and leaned how to put in a grocery order and then went back to finish up my two weeks notice at The Omaha World-Herald. Other than that, it was figure it out as I went along. My second week there I was told that I was going to be on my own as the manager-in-charge for second shift on a Friday night. The Store Director and Assistant Store Director would be leaving at 5:00pm, and I would be on my own until the Night Manager arrived at 9:00pm. I had no idea what I was doing, or even where anything was. Fortunately most of the action was handled by the Front End shift supervisor, who oversaw the cashiers. A team of grocery clerks brought the shopping carts in, cleaned the bathrooms and kept the aisles and displays full. When I asked George, the Store Director if I was going to get any training he told me that I'd figure it out and I was the evening supervisor 1pm - 10pm every Friday. The only manager in the store for 5 hours.

Friday nights were where I learned a lot about managing, not just the tasks, like ordering, but keeping all the balls in the air, dealing with angry customers, keeping all the clerks busy, making sure the Deli and the Bakery and the Meat department crews were all doing their jobs. One night, as I was making my rounds, I saw our evening janitor, Bill, gathering up trash to take out to the dumpster. Or that's what I thought he was doing. As I observed him, I saw that he was hiding items of produce under the trash bags, very carefully constructing what looked like a cart full of trash, but was really full of items that he was stealing. I called the police and had him ticketed for shoplifting. He ended up getting the charges dropped because the cop screwed up the paperwork. He had the gall to ask for his job back. He did not get it. 

I mentioned in my reminisces about my part time job with The Omaha World-Herald that my hours were different than what I thought they would be. I knew that I would be working at least one weekend day, but was surprised to learn the rest of the schedule expectations. A salaried manager was expected to work, not 40, but a minimum of 45 hours each week. Most days I was scheduled to work 6am - 3pm, with an hour for lunch. Fridays was 1-10pm without a lunch, since all the other managers left by 5:00pm. At first I had Sundays off, and had to work a half day on Wednesday, although "half day" was a misnomer. a half shift should have been 4 hours, so theoretically I should have been leaving at 10:00am, but we had a managers meeting from 9-10am, and since it was ad day I unfailingly had vendors looking for me when I came out of the meeting. Noon was a more common time to leave. Fortunately, shortly after I was hired we were given the choice of working 5 days or 5 ¹/₂  days, so my schedule changed to 6am - 4pm, with Thursday and Sunday off. 

Periodically our supplier, which at the time was Fleming Foods, would host a "Food Show". This was a gathering of vendors, who would promote their products, and give us an opportunity to buy quantity at lower prices. They also had an ad schedule; we had the opportunity to order our ad items in advance. An experienced grocery manager had a pretty good idea how much of a given product he could sell at a particular price, and order accordingly. I, on the other hand, had no idea what I was doing. I'm pretty sure my orders bore no relationship to what we could potentially sell. It was possible to check the computer database to see what had sold the last time a specific product was in the ad. One vendor, who was known as a weaselly sort, offered to sell me some Rotel, which sold well during Super Bowl.  I checked the database and ordered accordingly. The problem was that the database listed sales in units - I thought it represented cases. If I remember correctly we sold about 100 units around Super Bowl the previous year, which meant I needed 8-10 cases of 12 each. I ordered 100 cases. The vendor had to have known that I was making a rookie mistake, but let the order go through. We eventually sold it all, but it took all year! I never trusted that guy again. 

Years later all bulk or pallet sized orders originated in the corporate office. But when I was first promoted to grocery manager we had the freedom to order large quantities and run our own internal sales. I would regularly order a truckload of Old Orchard cranberry juice and other flavors, figure out what price point I wanted sell them at, calculate what price I needed to buy them at to achieve our gross profit goal, and negotiate with the supplier to get my target price. For about a year I would order a truckload every quarter and sell the whole delivery in less than two weeks. 

There were definitely some interesting characters in that store. Don, the Assistant Grocery Manager, was one of those guys who had a story for every occasion. He was a guitarist, and he used to talk about having played with some famous people, including David Crosby. No one believed what we thought were just tall tales until several years later talking with some local musicians who confirmed that he had indeed played with David Crosby! 

Terry was our janitor. He was a scruffy little guy with a giant moustache, who always seemed down on his luck. He would share his financial woes with the rest of us, woes that boiled down to him spending money foolishly. A couple of us offered to help him manage his money for a few months, especially since he was constantly taking out high interest payday loans to make ends meet, which always put him further behind, but he refused. The craziest thing he was involved in was getting involved with a woman in another state. This was around the year 2000, the infancy of the internet, and I don't remember how they got in touch. Despite being chronically broke he paid for her and her adult daughter to move here whereupon she moved in with him, hooked up with another guy, and kicked him out of his own apartment. He was the only person who I ever gave a zero to on an category of his annual review. This was in the category of appearance. There were a lot of issues there, but coming to work with a large hole in the seat of his jeans...while not wearing underwear, earned him that zero. 

Our maintenance man was another guy named Don. I don't remember him doing much maintaining, just a lot of walking around or standing up front with his arms crossed when we were busy. He was once asked to build a mobile podium for the cashiers' managers to use. The tiny wheels he put on it bent under the weight of the wood after one shift. I was assigned by the store director to do Don's annual review. The reviews had 15 categories where we rated the employees on a scale of 0 - 4. A "2" indicated that an employee was doing the basics, but not really doing anything outstanding. It was a typical score for someone new. A "3" meant that they were an excellent employee. "4's" were rare, but I always tried to find some reason to give a few. Some managers maintained that they meant "perfect", which was incorrect - it was more like "over and above", or "an example to others". If you didn't miss any work and showed up in the proper uniform every day I gave you a "4" in the attendance and uniform categories. (A "1" meant you had areas that were well below standard; a "0" was rare enough that I only gave out one in 17 years. I gave Don a pretty good review. A couple of "4's" and "2's" and mostly "3's". Weirdly he sat through the review sullenly declining to give an feedback or response. After we were done he stomped into the store director's office and slammed the door. He thought that he should have received all "4's" and complained about his review. Fortunately, the store director backed me up. 

My biggest challenge during my time as a grocery manager was my relationship with the Night Crew. In theory the grocery manager decided what displays would be built and where. The grocery manager did the daily ordering which  determined their nightly work load. The problem was that the Night Crew had very firm ideas about how things should be done and what they would do. My own inexperience added to the mess. Again, in theory, the grocery manager was supposed to "walk the store" and make sure the Night Crew had left everything in order. In practice, any changes or input were going to be ignored. Very soon after I started, Mike, the Assistant Store Director, pointed out a few minor things to me that he thought needed to be changed, and that he wanted me to communicate to the Night Crew. They were so minor I can't even remember what they were, but when I talked to Alex, the Night Manager, about it, he out and out refused. If you've read my series on managers, you know that a manager has several possible sources of leverage over their employees. 

1. Legitimate Power: The ability to influence others due to one's position, office or formal authority
2. Reward Power: The ability to influence others by giving or withholding rewards such as pay, promotions, time off, etc.
3. Coercive Power: The ability to influence others through punishment
4. Expert Power: The ability to influence others through special knowledge or skills
5. Referent Power: Power that comes from personal characteristics that people value, respect or admire

There were several problems that stymied my ability to get the Night Crew to do what I needed them to do. 

1. I wasn't technically the Night Manager's boss - he was very aware that, although I was responsible to give them direction, on the org chart we were equal. I didn't have any formal authority to tell them what to do
2. I had no control over pay, vacation, promotion. There was nothing I could do for them. 
3. I couldn't force them - same as #2. There was nothing I could do to them. 
4. I couldn't dazzle them with my deep knowledge of merchandising or even stock crew operations, because I didn't have either. To them I was an outsider (true) whose only experience was six months as a stocker. My many years experience as a manager was worthless to them. 
5. I've worked for managers who got things done simply because they were good people that their employees would do anything for. I've been that manager on occasion. These guys had no respect for anyone, least of all me. 

The problem was exacerbated by the refusal of the Store Director to address the problem. I exacerbated it myself a couple of months after I started. Thanksgiving was coming up, my first big holiday as a manager. As the big day approached I kept hearing the phrase "double truck". Due to the holiday, one of our regular deliveries would be eliminated, so extra stock needed to be ordered to make up the difference. But I took the term "double truck" very literally. If normal procedure called for one case, I ordered two. If it called for two cases, I ordered four. When I arrived at work the next morning the aisles were choked with stock that would not fit on the shelves. Craig, the Assistant Store Director (the previously mentioned Mike had transferred to a new store) had to literally prevent Alex from assaulting me. 

My lack of experience coupled with the Night Crew's lack of respect escalated. One night a member of the forklift crew ripped up a list of changes that I left for them right in front of me. Alex refused to walk the aisles with me in the morning, despite our VP of Operations and Store Director mandating that it be done. It finally came to a head during a meeting that included me, Don, my Assistant Grocery Manager, the Night Manager and his Assistant Night Manager, the Store Director and Assistant Store Director. I don't know if Alex had complained about me, or if store management finally saw a problem that needed to be resolved. The meeting was tense, but it seemed like we were getting things figured out. Alex and his assistant talked about the amount of time it took to execute a change in a display and I promised to keep the operational side of things in mind when planning. It all appeared to be headed for resolution; I summed up my side of things by saying that I just wanted to have open communication. Alex responded with "Well, I'm communicating that you don't really know how a night crew works" or something similar. Store Director George attempted to smooth that over by asking both of us if we could work together moving forward. Alex shrugged and gave an answer something like "I'll do what I can". George was prepared to accept this, but Assistant Store Director Craig exploded. He asked Alex what he meant by that. What he thought "doing what I can" entailed. He ripped into him for his comment about communication. He ripped into him for his attitude. He made it clear that he thought that the problems between day and night teams were entirely Alex's fault. 

From that moment on I had an ally in Craig. Even though Alex didn't respect Craig either (he had recently left another grocery chain to work for Super Saver), Craig did have real authority over the Night Manager and backed up my decisions, while at the same time teaching me how to be better at my job.

Not long after this meeting most of the bulk and truckload ordering had moved from store level to the corporate office. All available storage space was rapidly being filled. Unlike Food 4 Less, the back rooms at Super Saver were small and were not designed to store large quantities. Overstock was stacked on top of the warehouse racking on the sales floor. All of that top deck space had been filled and pallets were being stacked three high near the check stands, and in other areas of the store not designed for storage. Alex and his crew complained to no avail, until one day, fed up with the mess, Alex and several of his most experienced forklift drivers walked out. Now this left us short staffed, but no one missed Alex. 

The two years that I worked at the 48th & O Super Saver were in some ways the last gasp of the old school way of running a grocery store. I mentioned earlier that bulk ordering shifted to the corporate office. Adequate staffing was coming to an end. In Super Savers the Grocery Manager oversaw the janitors and grocery clerks, who were responsible for bringing in carts from the lot and generally keeping the store in order. In those days there would be four grocery clerks and a "utility clerk" (basically a janitor) on duty in the evenings, with six clerks on weekends. By the time I left Super Savers in 2013 we were lucky if we had two. Having that many unspecialized staff meant that not only could you handle special events that required extra staff, like anniversary cake giveaways, but if someone called in sick in another department you could loan them out to check, or stock dairy, or fill produce racks. It wasn't long before Walmart came to town, resulting in fewer sales. The corporate answer was always to cut labor. Another change was the bonus structure. For some reason Grocery, Frozen, Dairy, General Merchandise (GMD) and Spirits Managers were not eligible for bonuses, but the so-called perishable departments, Meat, Deli, Bakery and Produce were able to earn quite lucrative bonuses. A Meat Manager could conceivably make $60,000-70,000 in bonuses on top of a typical $35,000 a year salary. The potential bonuses were much reduced, which angered many long term managers, especially the Meat managers who had grown to expect the large payouts as part of their salary. 

After about two years as a Grocery Manager I started to set my sights on a promotion to assistant store director (ASD). My own ASD had started coaching me on some of the responsibilities of the position and I felt confident that I would be able to step up. There had been some changes with store directors retiring and ASDs moving up, leaving several open positions. I was considering applying for the position in one of the smaller stores, but my ASD counselled me to wait, suggesting that something better would open up soon. In fact, he was promoted to store director, opening up an ASD position in my own store. I interviewed for the position and was offered the job. Unknown to me, Tom S, the Operations VP, was offering the job to Lonnie, the ASD at the Cornhusker Super Saver. So I had to interview again, this time for the ASD position at the Cornhusker store. Brian, who had hired me as a stocker two years before, was still in charge and hired me as the Assistant Store Director for his store. 

Time for the next new adventure.

Workin' Man - Part XII - Paying Off the Pile of Debt and More Newspaper Delivery

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

Over the course of five or six years, in order to pay off $20,000 in credit card debt, I had a succession of part-time jobs in addition to my main job. The first position was as a night stocker at the Cornhusker Super Saver while I was still a manager at The Omaha World-Herald. I worked four nights a week, 9:00pm - 2:00am, 20 hours/week. When I came in at 9:00, my first task was go around to all displays and organize them so that the forklift crew could start filling them right away. Usually the delivery truck came in at 10:00. Another stocker and I would unload the truck and then start "stringing" the aisles, i.e. taking the stock from the pallets and setting it on the floor in front of the shelf where it would ultimately be placed. Once this was done the manager would assign me to either work with the forklift crew filling displays or to work one of the aisles. Since I was only scheduled until 2:00 it would either be a smaller aisle, or I'd work with another employee to stock their aisle. I was 40 years old, and by far the oldest one on the crew and was frequently mistaken for a manager. It was pretty routine work, but I wasn't getting much sleep. The most exciting things that ever happened was the occasional run-in with a shoplifter (company policy hadn't yet banned physical contact). The worst that happened was getting buried in a pile of bodies one night when several stockers tackled a shoplifter who I was chasing. Ouch! 

Back at the World-Herald, my disenchantment with the bonus and salary situation led me to start exploring my options. A new store had just been built in Lincoln, resulting in multiple management openings, including the Grocery Manager at the Super Saver at 48th & O. The Grocery Manager was in charge of what we called "Center Store" the food aisles of can and boxes, as well non-food items like detergent and paper towels. The Grocery Manager was considered next in line behind the Store Director and Assistant Store Director. I was hired for the position after an interview with George Hill, the Store Director. Of course, now I couldn't keep my part-time job with Super Saver, so I agreed to stay on with the Omaha World-Herald part-time. 

My new part-time position was as an assistant to my replacement. I was doing some of the same things, repairing racks, tracking single copy sales and collecting from the racks on weekends. But it didn't last very long. One reason was that my schedule at my new grocery job was not 6am - 2pm as I thought it would be, but 6am - 4pm. (9 hours work + an hour for lunch), so I couldn't get to the newspaper office until late. The other reason was that the new State Circulation Manager, who set up his office in Lincoln, unlike Omaha, as his predecessors did, was cleaning house of holdovers and filling positions with his own people. I was told I was being laid off because we "had too many part-timers", but they soon replaced me and the others they "laid off". 

I still needed a second job, so I took a job as a telemarketer. They weren't very picky about who they hired. I found out later that in a group of 20 new hires, 5 or 6 would leave on break during the first night of training. When night two of training started there would be fewer than 10 left. After one shift working the phones for real, 5 newbies would be left. Only 2 or 3 would end up staying around. It was hire in bulk and see who sticks with it. The place was open Monday - Saturday, from 8:30am - 9:00pm. I'd work an 8-hour shift on Thursday, my day off, and 4-hour shifts, 5:00 - 9:00pm on week nights. I had a  rotating weekend off at the grocery store, so I would work a full shift on my one Saturday a month off. 

Telemarketing is a hard job. There's a lot of rejection - think about how often you hang up on cold calls. But there are sales. Think about it, there would have to be, or why would companies keep doing it. I was very skeptical about my ability to make any sales, since part of our sales spiel involved getting the potential sale's bank account number and social security number. I thought surely no one would be that stupid to give that information out. I thought wrong. Most of the phone crew managed to average two sales per hour. There were a lot of hang ups and rejections, but as long as we consistently achieved our goal of two sales per hour, everything was fine. Back then minimum wage was $5.15/hour. We were paid $8.00/hour to start, plus commission. If you averaged 1 sale/hour, you received $1.00/sale. If you averaged 2 sales/hour, your commission went up to $2.50/sale. If you managed managed to average 3 sales/hour you received $4.00/sale. Once you closed the sale a verifier would get on the line and confirm your sale to eliminate the possibility of cheating. 

We sold several different products. Our main one was called Auto Savings Discount Club (ASDC) which had nothings to do with autos or savings, and wasn't a discount or a club. (It later changed its name to American Savings Discount Club) What it turned out to be was getting people with bad credit to sign up for a limited line of credit for a fee. After paying a fee a member could draw on this line of credit to pay bills in an emergency - paid back at interest of course. Eventually the FCC closed them down - they were preying on people with poor credit and it turned out they weren't even giving them access to the lines of credit. 

We also did some political polling. The first time was for Jon Corzine, who was running for Senator in the New Jersey Democratic primary. Most of the people we called would ask whether he was Democrat or Republican, and when I responded that he was a Democrat would assert that they were voting for him.  My explanation that it was the primary, and that they were all Democrats, fell on deaf ears and I eventually just gave up trying to explain. The one that was really interesting was when we did polling for a New York City Council candidate. First we would call and ask some questions about which issues were most important, once we had the answers we would call back in a month, emphasizing all the issues that our candidate agreed with the voter we were calling, ignoring the areas of disagreement. A different script would pop up for each voter, depending on how they had answered the questions during the previous call. Tricky bastards, those pollsters. 

Before the place was shut down, I got very good at selling ASDC. The trick was to cycle through the "no's" as quickly as possible. This meant getting a sense for who was either too dense to understand what you were selling or too smart to fall for it, in addition to those were just going to string you along. Once you knew you had one of these you had to get off the phone as soon as possible and tee up the next one. Since telemarketing success depends in large part in reaching a lot of people, the key to making sales is to not waste time with the people who aren't interested. I developed an ability to detect early in the call who I should push it with and who I should give up on quickly. Getting those who I knew were a lost cause off the phone enabled me to reach more people and therefore get more sales. This was against company policy, which had a script for you to follow that needed a "no" three distinct times before you could move on. We had a quality assurance monitor who would listen to our calls and write us up if we deviated from the script. But those of us who brought in a lot of sales were eventually left alone. 

One of the recurring reasons to drop a call was when the person we were calling wasn't home. We were supposed to then try to sell to whoever answered the phone, as long as they were an adult. This never worked. We'd ask for "Bob Smith", and be told that Bob wasn't home. According to the script we were to say that we could make the offer to them - Mrs. Smith, or Bob Smith's brother, whoever - and proceed with the script. The problem - every single time - was that, no matter how well you thought the call was going, no matter how much it seemed like a sale, when you swooped in for the close they would invariably say "Bob's not home". Why bother? 

I used to get a kick out of people who were conflicted about what we were selling, but didn't want to come right out and say that they weren't interested. We'd get to the close and have to ask them for their bank account information.

Me: I'll just need your bank account number

Prospect: I don't know it

Me: All you have to do is look on the bottom of your checks, the first nine digits is the routing number...

Prospect: My checkbook is in my car

Me: Okay, I'll wait while you go out to your car and get it

Prospect: I don't know where my car is

Me: What?

Prospect: My brother has it

Me: *Click*

I don't know if people really kept their checkbooks in their cars, or they just thought it sounded like a plausible excuse, but in the two years I was there I heard this dozens of times. 

I mentioned earlier that my work schedule rotated my days off once a month. The company required a request in advance to change the schedule, but they tired of me requested a change every month and decided to just let me come in whenever I felt like it. Many weeks I worked until I made my goal for sales for the week. After I had been on the phones for around two years I was getting a divorce. After missing a few shifts to find a place to live I stopped in to the phone bank, only to find out we were shutting down because ASDC, our biggest client, was being shut down by the FCC, and the money they owed us was frozen. We eventually got paid. Once again I needed a part-time job.

By this time I was an assistant store director at the Cornhusker Super Saver, I wasn't having any success finding a second shift job, so I ended up taking a Lincoln Journal Star seven-day motor route. My territory was the southwest corner of Lancaster County - west of Highway 77 and south of Highway 33, including the towns of Sprague and Hallam. I'd start around 2:00am and deliver papers until around 6:00; head home, shower and start work at Super Saver at 7:00. Gas was around $1.60/gallon. I was making over $900/month after paying for gas and replacing the occasional tire. I ran this route from November 2001 through May 2002. It's not generally known that paper carriers are classified as independent contractors. You can't call in sick or take a day off unless you can find someone to substitute for you. So I worked sick and never took a day off. I paid for gas and tires myself. A problem being an independent contractor is that you don't receive a paycheck, you receive a check representing your net profit, with no tax or social security taken out. This means that you're likely to have to pay the IRS in April, rather than receiving a refund as most people do. I didn't report my paper route income and ended up having to pay the back taxes plus penalty and interest when the IRS figured it out. Ouch. 

In 2002 I planned on taking a trip to New York to visit family, stopping along the way to see friends. I planned on being gone for around two weeks, but could not find anyone to cover for me, so I had to quit. I still needed a second job. That Autumn I was contracted to deliver the Tuesday afternoon Star Express, a free paper put out by the Lincoln Journal Star. This was a lot easier that the rural route and it was only one day a week! And it was in the daylight! After a year or so the Star Express was discontinued. The Journal Star started a program where all non-subscribers would receive a paper every Wednesday morning. By this time I had long since paid off my debt, but was keeping the route to help make ends meet. I was making $200/month, which was the same amount that I was paying in child support for my last minor child. Once I was no longer paying child support I decided that I no longer needed the extra income and quit the last in a long succession of second jobs.

Workin' Man - Part XI - Consultants, Management Time and The Answer Man, Oh My

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

I have learned over the decades to be extremely suspicious of consultants. They generally don't know as much as they think that they do, they make extravagant promises and make sure to feed you enough information to keep you interested and willing to keep bringing them back. I don't recall the name of this consultant, but what he was pitching was process improvement. In general I think process improvement is a good idea. In short, what it involves is looking at your processes for anything that is superfluous and analyzing the steps and handoffs involved. Are there steps that are unnecessary or don't add value? Is it generating paper that doesn't go anywhere? Are unnecessary people involved? The program started off with a weekend retreat at Mahoney State Park attended by representatives from all of the company's divisions. We were supposed to hash out a plan to implement a process improvement program, based on guidance from the consultant. What we came up with was a grass roots, from the bottom up, methodology for  implementing change in the company. According to the plan, a core group of people would go around to all the departments, interview the staff, and map out the processes involved in their jobs. Once this was all done, a team of any four people could implement a change to any department after putting together a detailed plan. Coaches, who had undergone training by the consultant, who be available to guide and advise the change teams. So far do good. Or so we thought. 

The problems started right away. The unionized sections of the company refused to participate. Other areas like the reporters didn't have a specific procedure that they followed. I was one of the coaches, and stayed busy training teams on how to implement change according to the program. But more problems cropped up when teams that had no real understanding of how divisions of the company worked were making changes to those divisions without the permission, or even the input, of the affected managers. I don't remember anything actually getting done. Ever. Eventually the Publisher (newspaper-speak for CEO) got tired of the whole thing and fired the consultant. My skepticism of consultants continues to this day. 

I was one of those people who volunteered for everything. And got volunteered for everything. One of the more fun things that I signed up for was being on staff for the Omaha World-Herald carrier newsletter. Every month I wrote an article called "The Answer Man". My non de plume was Dlarehd L. Rowahamo - which is Omaha World-Herald spelled backwards. The premise was that Dlarehd was either from another planet, or perhaps another dimension or timeline, and didn't quite understand what was going on. He constantly got things backwards, but ended up covering things that needed to be covered, like sales contests and changes in subscription price, in a humorous manner. The first few issues were a battle to stop the editors from spell checking me, since I made up a lot of words! I was once involved in a seminar where the facilitator was trying to demonstrate the value of consensus in putting together a mission statement, rather than simply a vote of the majority. My thinking was that the bigger the group, the less likely it is that consensus could be achieved. So during this consensus building exercise, I decided that I would be a contrarian and refuse to agree to the nascent consensus. The moderator tried to negotiate with me, but I dug in my heels and wouldn't agree to anything. Was I being a jerk? Absolutely, but I also effectively debunked his idea of the inevitability of consensus. I believe they abandoned consensus and decided to outvote me!

One of the things I learned participating in all of those committees was that there is an ideal number of people on a committee. Too few and you get groupthink; too many and you never come to a conclusion. Once a committee gets too big the best thing that can be done is break it up into subcommittees. Have that subcommittee do the work of crafting a plan, then present it to the larger group and have them vote on it. 

There were a lot of other projects and committees that I volunteered for, but despite all the work I was putting into these activities that were adjacent to my regular job description, they weren't really valued by management. Every year State Circulation had an annual meeting where awards were given out for outstanding achievement. There were cash awards given out in conjunction with these recognitions as well. One particular year I was sure I'd be recognized for something like team player, (for which there was an award) or for all the committees I was recruited for, but every award, like every other year, went to the sales reps whose sales went up the most. I had an epiphany. I realized that I was spending hours upon hours every week on projects that simply weren't valued and resulted in no reward or even recognition. Not even a pat on the back. The next day I resigned from every single committee and program that I was involved in and spent my time on the things that would bring me recognition, and more importantly, more money!

The most interesting thing I was involved in was an 18-month management training course. At least part of it was interesting. Honestly I can't remember most of what they covered, but we would be at training two-three days a week a couple of times a month. One class that stood out was one where we were supposed learn how to let go of our stress and to relax by means of guided meditation. I didn't get much out of it, but one of my fellow trainees fell asleep and was snoring loudly. I guess he was relaxed! The part that I learned the most from, and have carried to this day, was a week-long class called Managing Management Time. I had taken my share of time management courses before, including one that was a thinly disguised front for a company selling pocket calendars. (This was well before the days when everyone had a multi-purpose supercomputer in their pocket) Managing Management Time was a theory of management that I had never heard before. The premise was that management was a skill like any other, and separate from the skills of the people that were being managed, the ranks of whom the manager had presumably arrived from. The time management tips were really corollaries to spending your time as a manager, not just another one of the guys. One of the main nuggets of wisdom was the saying "The job of a manger is not to do things, but to get things done.  The course covered a lot of the management fallacies. One was the "Pride of Craft" fallacy, where a new manager was so attached to her pre-management job, that she would spend a large portion of her work week doing the job that she had just been promoted out of. This was in addition to all the new management responsibilities. This was why many new managers end up working 60-70 hour weeks! Other topics included the responsibility of a manager to train his subordinates to do their jobs independently, instead of micromanaging them; and knowing what things were actually her responsibility - knowing who the "monkey" belonged to! A piece of practical advice included procrastination: if nobody follows up on that task you were given, it probably wasn't that important! The main nugget of wisdom was that there was management time and vocational time. As managers we were being paid to manage, not to do the tasks that we were paying other people to do. Your subordinates might think you were a cool guy for getting your hands dirty working side by side with them, and occasionally that might serve as a morale builder, but it wasn't your job. I still have the book from this class on my bookshelf and have applied the principles consistently over the years. 

As I mentioned in the previous installment, my old manager Dave was once again my manager. He was much easier to work with this time around. Maybe he had mellowed with experience. Maybe he was thankful he had a veteran like myself on his team. Whatever the reason, it was considerably better this time around. After I had been back in my old district for a while, Dave decided to make a change. Dodge County, which included the city of Fremont, had recently been detached from its district in Region 4 and added to our region. Fremont had two busy distributorships as well as a number of large motor routes, both seven-day and Sunday only, as well as routes in all of the smaller towns. Dave asked me if I would consider taking over that district, along with a decent raise. I agreed. On my first Sunday in the county Dave and I both were out delivering papers in a blizzard! I also had my first visit to South Dakota when I was assigned to convert all the racks in South Dakota to new settings after a price change. 

Outside of Dodge County, things were changing in State Circulation. A lot of the managers who had been in charge were leaving the company. The last several State Circulation Managers had risen through the ranks within the newspaper, but one by one they were being promoted into Metro, transferred to one of our subsidiaries, or leaving the company altogether. The new State Manager was from outside the company and had already brought in a few of his friends from his previous newspaper as Region Managers. Like many new executives, he was keen to shake things up and make changes. He and Dave did not get along. The friction got so bad that Dave eventually resigned. It was funny - after Dave left a lot of the other sales reps asked me if I was worried since "my buddy" had left, not realizing that Dave and I were far from "buddies"! 

Jerry, the new Region Manager had come from our competitor, The Lincoln Journal-Star. He convinced me to transfer districts again, this time back to the Lincoln Office as the Single Copy Manager. This time around I also had some responsibility for single copy throughout all regions of the state.  This involved putting together an inventory of every rack in the state (outside of the Omaha metro area) and ordering and delivering new racks when needed. I conducting training classes on rack repair and changing pricing mechanisms. It was amazing how many sales reps had no idea where the racks were in their districts or in what shape they were in. In dealing with the Region Manager and his sales reps in the Western Nebraska Region I also got a taste of how small town Nebraskans viewed people from the urban areas - with barely concealed disdain. I remember trying to get an address for a storage facility in Kearney so I could deliver some new racks and being told that this wasn't the big city, we don't have addresses out here. (Spoiler: there was an address)

Around this time, in order to pay off my credit card debt I took a part-time job working the night stocking crew at the Super Saver on Cornhusker Highway. I'll discuss that job more in a future article. I got the job because one of the guys who worked on my crew at Food 4 Less was a manager there. He introduced me to his Store Director whose only question was "Can you work nights?" - I was hired. 

As Single Copy Manager I was always looking for ways to sell more papers. I hustled around town looking for new locations for racks, and worked on maximizing the number of papers in each location, paying attention to sales and returns. On Husker Football Game Days we rented a parking stall at the old Greyhound Station and parked a pickup truck there full of papers. We sold a paper-spirit card combo for the price of a paper (then 25¢) which counted as paid circulation. The big win was when I convinced downtown restaurants to commit to paying for hundreds of papers at a reduced rate that I would give away at the stadium with a map to the restaurant stapled to the sports section. We did this for every Lincoln sporting event and it was a great success. My circulation numbers skyrocketed. Since increased circulation was one of the things that our bonus was based on, I was making some extra money!

Like at many places, when you succeed, you're expected to keep succeeding. In an industry where a 2% increase was almost unheard of (I used to say exceeding 2% will result in a temple being built, devoted to your worship) I achieved a 20% annual increase in paid circulation. The company set my goal the following year for another 20%. I achieved a only 10% increase (still, 30% greater than 2 years previously) but received no bonus, even though sales reps with 1% and 2% increases did. I was extremely unhappy. By this time, there was a new State Circulation Manager (again), this time a transplant from the Lincoln Journal Star who Jerry didn't get along with, so I got a new, new boss, a guy named Kevin. Kevin was able to get me a salary increase, (no bonus recalculation though) but I thought it was a case of too little, too late, and resigned to take a management job with Super Saver. This meant that I needed to quit my part-time job with Super Saver and get a new part-time job to pay off my debt. I took a part-time job with the Omaha World-Herald!

Workin' Man - Part X - More Ups and Downs, Promotions and Demotions

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

Back to Southeast Nebraska, District 55. At least I hadn't been fired and I was in an area that I was familiar with. Not long after this the State Circulation Manager transferred to another newspaper and we got a new boss, who as I would find out, didn't care about the whole Grand Island debacle. For a while I kept my head down, but I had a few bumps in the road. In my previous time as a sales rep I was pretty lucky, I was always able to fill an open route without having to go out and deliver it myself. Finally the odds caught up to me. One of my Sunday Only motor route carriers was quitting. He gave plenty of notice, but I was unable to find a replacement before his last day. I had driven around with him in the daylight, and he had given me a set of directions. But the world looks a lot different in the middle of the night. It must also be emphasized that in those days the 911 addresses for rural homes had not been implemented yet, every addresses was a P.O. Route and a Box Number. Other than highways, no roads had signs, so unless you had a great sense of direction, you didn't know where you were. So, without a replacement I had to deliver the route myself. It should have taken around four hours. It seemed like the directions were accurate. I was able to move along pretty steadily for a couple of hours until inexplicably, I ran into a problem. The roads weren't lining up with the directions. There were "T" intersections where roads should have gone through, minimum maintenance instead of gravel and the like. I traced my route backwards on the directions and realized that about an hour previously I had missed the words "make a U-turn" and had been going in the wrong direction and delivering to the wrong houses for about an hour. I attempted to backtrack, but ended up even more lost, and by this time I didn't have many papers left to deliver to the correct houses, even if I did manage to retrace my steps back to where I made the error. So I went home and waited for the phone calls...there were many. The old carrier was also getting calls. I knew this when he left a message on my answering machine, screaming "Do your job, do your job, do your damn job!"

The Lincoln/Lancaster County Circulation Office had always operated as a separate region, with a manager and two sales reps, but the corporate office decided to combine the office with the southeast Nebraska District, so I ended up transferring into the Lincoln district. The location had been designed with three offices, each accessible from a hallway which ran from a receptionist's desk up front to a bullpen for carriers and bundle haulers in the back. At some point it was decided that a fourth office was needed, so they split one the three office in half, with the new office accessible only by going through one of the other offices. That was my office. The good part of this arrangement was that anyone walking down the hallway couldn't see me - didn't even know I was there, so I was able to work in piece. 

I held a few positions while there. I spent some time as the office manager, which meant I hired and supervised all the bundle haulers, miss runners and office staff. At first it meant getting middle of the night phone calls from Mike, my dock supervisor, who always thought he needed to permission to handle any kind of problem. Eventually I encouraged him to operate more independently. 

Part of my tenure I was the Single Copy Manager. "Single Copy" refers to non-subscription, non-home delivery sales. It includes vending machines, aka "racks", as well as sales in gas stations, grocery stores and the like. One of the challenges was to maximize sales and minimize returns in the racks. A directive from the Omaha office was to shoot for one unsold paper in each rack every day. The theory was that, with exactly one paper left, no one who wanted a paper would find an empty rack and we would be assured that the maximum number of papers would be sold. A separate goal was that unsold papers would not exceed 20%. The problem with this was that these two goals were mutually exclusive. If there was one unsold paper in every rack, the number of unsold papers would exceed 20%. One of my favorite parts of the job was that I could spend my day in the fresh air, repairing malfunctioning racks, replacing older racks with new ones, or just giving them a good cleanup and polish. Of course, the rack out at Branched Oak received a lot of attention!

After a while, I felt that my stock was going back up and I had recovered from the Grand Island incident. A Regional Sales Manager position was opening up in Region 4, northeast Nebraska. Dave, my nemesis from years before, was being transferred from there to Region 5, since Michelle was leaving the company. I applied for the position, figuring it was a longshot. I had previously applied for an open Regional Manager slot in Western Nebraska, but had been turned down, so I was surprised that I had been selected. Since I lived in Lincoln, the new position would require a lot of driving, the region covered a lot of ground - all northeast Nebraska north of the Platte River from the Iowa border to Valentine, including South Dakota border counties. But once again I was walking into a mess that wasn't obvious until I got into the middle of it. 

Omaha World-Herald Regional Managers directly supervised 5-6 sales reps, each one overseeing a district of several counties. Most of my sales reps required very little supervision. Two exemptions were Max, a sixtyish guy who lived in Ord, and the sales rep for the district that included South Sioux City. The South Sioux City district had a lot of turnover and was in the process of converting to office billing when Dave transferred the sales rep from there to an open district in Region 5 - this took place in the short interim after Michelle left, but before I was promoted and Dave was running both Regions. This left me with an open District on Day One. I'll get back to that - let's talk about Max.

Max was probably younger then than I am now, but he came across to late thirties me as a curmudgeonly old man. He was one of those guys raised in a rural community who thinks "city folks don't know nothin'". He could be counted upon at every monthly meeting to loudly point out that his (rural) district was different than all the (supposedly) urban districts. The "big cities" he referred to were Fremont, Columbus, Norfolk and South Sioux City. Max also liked to wake up at 6:00 AM and start making phone calls. In the newspaper business, if there was going to be an emergency, it was going to take place well before dawn. If your alarm went off without you having had to go out and deliver a route, the possibility of an emergency had passed. Emergency or not, Max would call me some time between 6:00 and 7:00 AM, usually just to chat. I wasn't much of a morning person in those days, so a call from Max usually interrupted my sleep. After telling him one morning to not call me before 8:00 AM unless it was an emergency, he decided that undermining me would be a good career move. He would call up to the main office, usually the State Circulation Manager's secretary, and tell her that he couldn't get ahold of me. She would then call me, and I'd pick up. He was constantly going over my head and complaining. But this was just a minor irritant. 

The South Sioux City District didn't have a distributor, just several large motor routes, but some of the problems were similar to what I had encountered in Grand Island. The city and nearby Dakota City were in the process of being converted to office billing. The previous sales rep, under the previous Regional Manager Dave's direction, had taken over the billing, but had not fully turned it over to the central office when he transferred to another district, which I was unaware of. There were, like in Grand Island, a significant number of customers who had not been receiving bills. So, when I hired a new sales rep, he had a mess to deal with. It quickly overwhelmed him. If I had dug a little deeper, asked a few more questions, I might have anticipated the situation and gotten the other sales reps in to help with the billing and conversion. But the depth of the problems caused things to spin out of control quite fast. I had scheduled a meeting with my new sales rep to get an update on his progress. He met me at his door in a dirty t-shirt with a box full of unsent bills with the news that he was quitting with no notice. He also called my boss to let him know what a terrible manager I was. 

Troy, my immediate supervisor, met with me shortly thereafter. He had already communicated a few weeks earlier that he wasn't happy with my performance and that things needed to improve. Things hadn't improved. He gave me three options:

1. Stick with it, but if no improvement in two weeks, I'd be fired
2. Resign, i.e. leave without getting fired
3. Accept a demotion

I knew there was no way to turn it around in two weeks, and I didn't want to start job hunting, so I opted for number three. Troy was gracious about it and allowed me to inform my team of my decision myself. My demotion brought me back briefly to my old area - District 55 - Omaha, Nemaha, Johnson, Pawnee and Richardson Counties. Dave, who I had previously had problems with, was no longer the asshole he had been when I worked for him previously, possibly because he had a bunch of rookies as sales reps and was happy to have someone with experience on his team. 

Before I go on about my third stint as a sales rep in District 55, I want to divert to a few other things I got involved with over the years: the consultant-inspired "grass roots" process improvement initiative, the 18-month management training, and the various things I volunteered for. 

Workin' Man - Part IX - Paper Pushin', Number Crunchin' Son of a Bitch

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

 Looking at this period of my employment, it's clear that some kind of tutorial on how to handle money should have been part of the selection process when contracting distributors. Distributors, like carriers, were independent contractors. We didn't pay them for their time, they earned a profit on the difference between the cost of the papers and what customers paid them. Generally when contracting a new one, we got them a list of carriers and customers and left them to it. This just about guaranteed that the papers were delivered, but that's about it. 

In addition to the whole issue of cash flow that was covered in the previous installment, there was the fact that home delivered papers cost the distributor a different price than the "single copy" papers, i.e. those that were sold from vending machines. This became a problem once we had converted a distributorship to office billing. One particular distributor in Falls City was one of the few who understood the cash flow situation and had no problem making the transition to office billing. (i.e. he wasn't spending money that wasn't his) But this distributor, like many other who were now receiving a "profit check" every two weeks, viewed it as a "paycheck" and didn't understand when it varied according to the number of papers they ordered. In a typical distributorship the distributor received income from, not only the profit check, but from the cash in the form of quarters that they removed from the vending racks. There was a period of time when the number of subscriptions were dropping, but the number of papers sold in the vending machines was increasing. This caused the amount of the profit check to decrease, since in addition to the credit for what a customer paid for the paper, and the charge for the home delivery papers, there was also the charge for the papers going in to the racks. Of course this was balanced by an increased amount of money in cash, but it was hard to get them to understand. More math:

Let's say we have, like we did in Part VIII, 2000 papers in a city. 1500 of them are subscriptions and 500 are sold from racks. The subscriptions are billed at $1.00 each, and cost the customer $2.00 for $1.00/week in profit. The papers in the racks are billed at an average of $1.50/week, for a weekly profit of $1.25. In this example:

Net profit from subscriptions: $1,500

Charge for single copy: $750

Profit check: $750

Cash from racks: $1,375

Total profit: $2,125

But let's say the total numbers stay the same, but the ratio changes, say 1,250 subscriptions and 750 single copy

Net profit from subscriptions: $1,250

Charge for single copy: $1,125

Profit check: $125

Cash from racks: $2,062.50

Total profit: $2,187.50

The net profit has increased by $62.50, but since the check has decreased by the same amount, the illusion is that the distributor is making less money. My Falls City distributor was in a similar situation, and since he wasn't keeping track of the money he was collecting from racks, he thought he was making less money for the same amount of papers. It took a lot to convince him that he was actually ahead, but math is hard for some people. 

[The numbers I am quoting are for illustration purposes, I have no clear memory of what the World-Herald was charging for papers back then, or what the profit per paper was]

So I was dropped into this culture of lack of understanding of simple math, let alone the economics of profit/loss and cash flow. It was bad enough when I was auditing a distributor who had been contracted for a number of years, but in some cases there was a succession of distributors, one after the other, often starting out in the financial hole because the previous distributor had failed to transfer over future payments and the sales rep hadn't caught it. It was a mess of unbelievable proportions. It didn't help that some of the sales reps, ostensibly representing the company, sympathized with the distributors and undermined me as I showed up to do audits. One of the worst was in Grand Island.

Grand Island was divided into two distributorships, and both of them saw a parade of distributors presiding over the chaos. The district also included Hastings, also divided into two distributorships. One of my more memorable meetings was with a distributor who was delinquent in her payments. When showing up for audits I always dressed in a suit and tie to impress upon them the seriousness of my visit, even though the usual dress code was a bit looser, more like business casual. (I also dressed this way for court, a coworker once called them my "ass-kicking clothes") Whenever I arrived at an audit, usually for a distributor whom I had never met, I always introduced myself as "Tom Joyce, World-Herald Collections". Jackie, the sales rep for this area, who would end up quitting shortly after this audit, had apparently been coaching the distributor. My introduction was met with the response of "You're not nobody, you're just a paper pushin', number crunchin' son of a bitch". It didn't get any better from there on in.

The district that included Grand Island had been part of the western Nebraska Zone, number 7, but had been moved to Zone 5, the southeastern Nebraska region, where Michelle, my old manager was still in charge. This district was such a mess, that after Jackie quit, management decided that I would be sent in to clean it up before they would hire a new sales rep. I had done this for another district not long before and they apparently thought that I was the guy to fix all the issues. Of the Grand Island and Hastings distributorships, three of the four were open, i.e. substitutes were delivering the papers to the carriers while I paid the carriers, collected from the vending machines and tried to get things in order before we hired new distributors. Before I took over the distributorships had been converted to office billing, but I had not been involved in the conversion. In theory all the advanced payments had been transferred to the corporate office, but we found out much later that only around 75% of the customers were actually being billed, and of that 75% around a third were in arrears. This problem was hidden for quite a while. The cash that had been transferred from the previous distributor to the company run "office distributorship" was large enough that the bi-weekly statement showed a credit balance for over a month, maybe two. Since that cash transfer only represented a portion of the customers who were receiving papers, and since the statement billed the office account for the full amount of papers delivered, pretty soon the office account, which I was responsible for, started showing a balance due. Each week I collected quarters from the racks and deposited the funds, but it wasn't enough to balance out the fact that half the customers weren't paying for the papers. 

When I realized what was happening I tried to fix the problem. Many of the carriers couldn't produce route lists with names and addresses of customers. I suggested dropping the number of papers to match customers that we could verify and rebilling anyone who called to complain, but this idea was rejected. We had carriers hand deliver bills to all customers who we didn't have on our lists, and received only a trickle of payments. One of the things that I suspected was that the recently quit sales rep had artificially inflated sales number in order to earn a bonus. I'd seen this before. Before the days of office billing it was hard to verify whether a new customer was real or not. It was pretty clear by this juncture that a large percentage of papers were being delivered to people who didn't want them, or at least didn't want to pay for them. Again I explained to Michelle, the manager in charge of the Region, (Zones had been renamed Regions) the situation. She explained it to upper management, but we were still prevented from decreasing the number of papers.

The price paid by a subscriber for a paper doesn't come close to paying for the cost of producing that paper. Advertising is what paid the bills. But high circulation numbers served to justify higher advertising costs. The Audit Bureau of Circulation was an outside entity that confirmed circulation numbers so that the advertising sales reps wouldn't be tempted to inflate them. But if papers were being delivered and there was no evidence that they weren't being paid for, they counted toward your circulation numbers. Patrick D, the State Circulation Manager at the time, simply was unwilling to take a huge hit to the sales figures.

During all of this I was shielded somewhat from what was being discussed among the big dogs of Circulation. I informed Michelle of the problems, and I assumed that she was educating Patrick D about why it wasn't going to get better. I don't know if she was doing a poor job of communicating or Patrick just didn't want to hear it, but we both were summoned to Omaha for a meeting one afternoon. In the course of the conversation it became clear that Patrick thought that Michelle and I were mismanaging the district, or even possibly stealing money. He was adamant that the "missing" money was due to some malfeasance on the part of one or both of us. I tried to explain it was only missing on paper - that the balance due was there, and would only get larger because we were delivering more papers than we were getting paid for. He was not interested in anything I had to say, and made it clear that both mine and Michelle's jobs were on the line. I couldn't believe it, I couldn't believe that he would think that we would steal from the company and I couldn't believe that he couldn't understand simple math.

Here's where I shot myself in the foot. Not long before I had been out collecting quarters from the vending racks. I had around $300 in a bank bag - I don't recall why I put the bag on top of my car, but I did - and drove off, losing it.  Already Patrick had been making noises about the shortfall in the distributorship, and I was afraid to admit that I lost $300, so I didn't say anything, figuring that with all the other losses, it would go unnoticed. And it did, up to that point. (By this time the on paper shortfall was several thousand dollars) Scared that Patrick would somehow find out about the lost bank bag, I took $300 of my own money, bought a money order and deposited it, claiming that I had "found" a money order that I misplaced and forgot to deposit. I didn't think Patrick would believe the true story. Well, he didn't believe the fake story either, and saw it as evidence that I was up to something shady. I was called into his office and confronted with the fact that the date on the money order was a few days old, refuting my story. I chose not to try and defend myself. Amazingly, I was not fired, but I was demoted back to my old job, which had just come back open - southeast Nebraska, District 55.

Workin' Man - Part VIII - What? Am I Delivering Papers Again?

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

So, I was back to working multiple part-time jobs. The newspaper job was much as it had been a few years before. At the floor cleaning company I travelled around the city cleaning bathrooms and floors of the many businesses that Trotter had contracts with. Most of the guys I worked with were former convicts. One was the nephew of Charlie Starkweather. I think my boss was afraid of them. At one point he gave me a raise and told me that I was the crew supervisor, but asked me not to tell anyone that I was, since it would upset them. We cleaned a variety of places: a school room, a gym, a car dealership, a venue that could be rented out for weddings and other parties, and my old store that I had been fired from. After a few months I applied for a full-time salaried position at The Omaha World-Herald, Sales Representative for several counties in southeast Nebraska. 

The Omaha World-Herald's staff was divided into several divisions: Editorial, which included reporters and editors; Production, the people who put together the physical paper; Advertising, salesmen who sold ads in the paper - which paid most of the bills; Administrative - Personnel, Payroll and Accounting; and finally Circulation, the people who brought the newspaper to your door, the paper carriers, bundle haulers, truck drivers and the like. I was part of Circulation. 

Circulation was divided into two main divisions, Metro and State. Metro covered the city of Omaha and some of it's suburbs. State was further divided into Zones. Zone 4 was eastern Nebraska north of the Platte River as far west as Valentine; Zone 5 was eastern Nebraska south of the Platte River as far west as York; Zone 7 was the rest of Nebraska; Zone 6 was Western Iowa. Each Zone also included border counties in adjacent states. Each Zone was overseen by a Zone Manager and was further divided into districts run by a Sales Representative who coordinated paper carriers and "single copy" (store sales and vending machines, aka "racks"). Some areas, usually the small towns, received service every day, often by teenage paper carriers. The larger towns were coordinated by a distributor who handled many of the same duties as a sales rep within their town. Rural areas received papers only on Sunday, delivered by a "motor route carrier". Papers were delivered to the carriers by way of a complex web of drivers that were contracted by the Transportation Department, and who were not overseen by the sales rep. 

When I first started as a sales rep I was responsible for Lancaster, Otoe, Nemaha and Johnson Counties; not long afterward Lancaster was absorbed into the office that ran the city of Lincoln, and Pawnee and Richardson Counties were added to my district. As a sales rep I didn't have an office, but worked out of my home and my car. day to day, it wasn't a very difficult job, the carriers mostly worked without any supervision. Most customers paid their carriers directly. Carriers would order the total number of papers that they needed and were billed for them by the World-Herald. What was left over was the carrier's profit. 

Sales Reps were pretty much on their own with minimal supervision by the Zone Manager. The only things that your manager or the State Circulation Manager monitored was collections and sales. We would get a report every other week listing the status of each carrier's bill. If they were in arrears we were expected to send out a letter reminding them that their bill was overdue. If nonpayment went on for too long we were expected to visit the carrier and collect in person. This was hardly ever a problem. I had one restaurant owner in Brownville who had a rack out front. He liked to pay once a month and once threatened to thrown the rack in the Missouri River if I sent him another letter! The other thing that was monitored was sales. This was back in the pre-internet days when people were actually reading newspapers. We were expected to at least maintain our circulation numbers, but ideally increase them year over year. We would receive bonuses for increases of 1%, 2% or maintaining previous year's numbers. Every few months corporate would sponsor sales contests where carriers would receive cash or prizes for getting new customers. On occasion all the sales reps in a Zone would converge on a town and escort carriers door-to-door to solicit news sales. We could also contract telemarketers to increase sales as well. 

If things were running smoothly, you hardly had anything to do, and your work weeks were quite a bit less than 40 hours. On the flip side, if carriers quit and you had to deliver routes yourself as well as hunt for a replacement, you might be working in excess of 60 hour weeks. One thing that I have always been good at was organization and time management, so I made sure that all my carriers were trained to handle problems themselves, including minor issues like a vending rack that didn't work or a shortage of papers. 

I don't know if this was normal for businesses during this time period, but even though there was a "personnel" department, it wasn't like the Human Resources Departments that you see today. Personnel basically just made sure all the paperwork was filled out. There wasn't any annual performance reviews either. Pay increases were totally at the discretion of your manager. When I was first hired, my manager liked me, so I received decent increases. When she accepted a promotion as a Training Manager I applied for the open Zone Manager position. Not only did I not get the promotion, but I found out about it when I ran into another sales rep at the airport - management had no intention of informing me. Dave, the recipient of the promotion had started around the same time as I did. As with the lack of any kind of HR involvement in the review process, the manager had complete discretion regarding who was promoted. In this case both Dave and Jim, the State Circulation Manager, had similar backgrounds as high school football players and later, coaches. People tend to believe that people who are just like them are the most qualified. They obviously believe that they themselves are qualified, so people like them must also be the best candidates for promotion. Getting passed over for promotion might have over more easily if I had actually been interviewed for the position, but I made the best of it. The problem was that Dave was a terrible manager.

I don't know if  Dave had been the kind of coach who yelled at his players, or if it was just his personality, but he was rude and abusive. He made unreasonable demands and was a master of gaslighting well before I knew what gaslighting was. He was quite a contrast with Mary, our previous manager. By all accounts the sales reps in our zone were all doing our jobs competently, and Mary just got a promotion, so her methods must have been acceptable, but like a lot of newly promoted managers, Dave acted like things needed to be fixed. He had the "new sheriff in town" attitude. It got bad enough that several of us went over his head to complain to Jim, his immediate supervisor. Rather than taking us seriously, all of us were branded as complainers. The good news was that Dave and the manager from northeast Nebraska switched places. Michelle, the new manager was much easier to work with, but we all had targets on our backs. 

As the new year began I approached Michelle, our new manager, about a pay increase, which up until that time had been awarded automatically every January. I was told that raises were given for performance, not seniority. Obviously the result of speaking up about a bad manager had resulted in me being tarred as a "bad" employee. I was able to negotiate a re-evaluation of my performance in three months. During that time I did absolutely nothing different, but received a raise anyway. This was to be a pattern for my thirteen years with The Omaha World-Herald: alternating between being a star performer and getting in big trouble (sometimes my own fault, sometimes a victim of circumstance)

After I had been a sales rep for a few years, the State Circulation Manager created a new position - Special Projects Coordinator. It was an ill-defined position that boiled down to executing any bright idea the State Manager came up with. The first idea was to turn Sunday-only delivery areas into seven-day delivery areas. Most rural areas only received home delivery on Sunday, with Monday - Saturday papers arriving in the mail. The reason that this was the case was that it cost too much to pay someone to deliver papers over routes that were sometimes over 100 miles long and took hours to deliver...every day. Carriers made their money on the difference between what they were charged for the papers and what the customers paid them. On a small in-town route there wasn't much expense involved in delivering papers, but on these large motor routes where there were often miles between customers, the World-Herald added on what was called a "rate adjustment" to make the route financially viable for the carrier. Turning these Sunday Only routes into Seven Day routes would have meant increasing the rate adjustment. Without getting too deep into the math, the profit on a Sunday paper was quite a bit higher than for a daily paper, so the rate adjustment would have to be increased by a factor of 10 or 15 at least, not merely six. This was clearly financially unsupportable. Add this to the reality that most, if not all, the Sunday motor carriers worked a regular job during the week and would be unavailable Monday - Saturday. This would mean replacing them with someone willing to deliver newspapers every day. If they could be found. After working on this for a couple of months we were able to do this on only one route, and the initiative was abandoned. 

My next assignment as Special Projects Coordinator was to fill in as Acting Collections Manager after the previous manager retired. The OWH was in the process of converting customers from paying the carriers to them being billed centrally from the corporate office. This would mean that instead of paying a bill every two weeks, carriers would receive a biweekly check for their profits. (They would still be collecting cash from their vending machines and any stores they delivered to). This meant that I would have to audit carriers and distributors to get a list of all their customers, as well as how far they had paid in advance. What we would do with this information was enter the customers' information in the Circulation database. If they had paid in advance, as most did, the distributor would turn that money over to the corporate office. Future billings and payments would be handled centrally. The problem was that most distributors were spending the money instead of setting it aside to cover future bills.  Let me illustrate with some math:

A city of 24,000 might have around 7,000 households, and possibly 2,000 subscriptions. Back then a seven-day subscription was $2.00. So, at the beginning of a 13-week billing period the distributor would have collected $52,000. I don't recall what we charged the distributor per subscription, but let's say that it was $1.00. That means that every week the distributor owed the World-Herald $2,000. Let's say the carriers  made 50¢ per subscription, that another $1,000 a week. So at the end of 13 weeks the distributor will have paid out $39,000 and have a profit of $13,000. 

A smart distributor would put that $52K in the bank where it would earn interest and draw from the account to pay the World-Herald and his carriers. But what was happening was that the $52,000 in the bank was very tempting. Time and time again distributors were using that $52,000 (only $13,000 of which was ultimately his if they were still in the job through the entire 13 weeks) and spending it. I was aware of a couple of people who bought vehicles with that money that wasn't theirs. They would then scramble around to pay their bills and their carriers. They were constantly in a cash flow crisis mode. But it really became a problem when a distributor quit mid-billing period. Let's illustrate with more math:

A distributor quits after week eight of the billing period. Theoretically he should have $20,000 in the bank which represented 2,000 customers who had paid their $2.00/week in advance. This money should have been turned over to the new distributor because it wasn't his! Time after time distributors quit without turning over the advance payments, leaving the new distributors immediately in the hole. A similar issue occurred when we were converting a distributorship over to office billing. An audit would determine how much advance payments a distributor was holding, and they would be billed for that money. If they were properly managing their cash flow there was no problem. The customers would be billed when their subscription expired and the distributor would receive a check for their profit every week. In many cases, they weren't properly managing their cash flow and would abruptly quit when they were billed for thousands of dollars that they had already spent. 

My job for about a year was to go around auditing distributors and carriers on large routes in order to facilitate the conversion to central office billing. As part of this process I was tasked with taking those who owed us money to court. Sometimes it was small claims, sometimes it was district court. The World-Herald did not send a lawyer in with me, although their legal department helped draft papers. 

This was at the same time the most interesting and the most frustrating part of my time with the paper. 

Workin' Man - Part VII - Da Boss

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson

Getting promoted to Night Manager, a full time, salaried position, enabled me to work just one job. I was able to give up my job at the Omaha World-Herald, leaving an unburnt bridge behind me (which would come in handy later on) At the time, Food 4 Less operated three stores in Lincoln: N 48th & O Sts, S 48th St & Pioneers Blvd and one on Havelock Ave (now a Russ's Market). Shortly before this promotion the owners decided that my store would stay open 24 hours a day. My shift would be 9:00pm - 7:00am, even if we finished stocking the truck earlier; now I had regular hours and a regular paycheck. 

Newly promoted from the ranks, I still thought like a stocker, even though I was responsible not only for getting displays built and the shelves stocked, but since we were open now, for customer service as well. Learning to think like someone who was in charge of the whole store was a mindset that would take time. Scheduling was my biggest headache. We had recently started receiving deliveries from two different warehouses, one which delivered on three days and the other on two different days. The warehouse that delivered on two days brought their load in the late morning, so I needed at least one person to come in and unload those trucks that would be stocked that night - fortunately we had such a large back room that leaving all those pallets in the back was no issue. The nights with no deliveries needed a small crew as well, to run back stock and to face the aisles. I now also had to schedule a cashier every night as well. 

One of the things that I was learning about being a manager, even though it would be many years before I was able to articulate it, is that it's not a manager's job to do things, but to get things done. In other words, you can accomplish more as a manager by leveraging your staff's abilities and getting the most out of them by training them to be effective at their jobs, than you can by simply adding your own labor to the mix. Many managers believe that a "good" manager is one who works alongside the crew, demonstrating that they're one of them. While there are morale-boosting benefits to doing this, it's only part of the job. For example if I'm "working hard" stocking the soup aisle, I have no idea what's going on in the rest of the store. Is the new stocker properly trained? Are there lines up front which require opening up a second cash register? Is there shoplifting going on? Is there broken glass on the floor in the baby food aisle that needs to be swept up? All these things can get missed if the person in charge is concentrating on a small part of the job. 

The store was situated on O Street, the main East-West arterial in Lincoln. Part of the parking lot was oriented so that you could sit in your car and watch the traffic go by, and keep an eye out for your friends as the drove by. We frequently had to go out into the lot and ask people to leave. For these discussions I often took two of my biggest and scariest looking stockers with me in order to emphasize the point! Although the part of town wasn't known as being especially rough, we still used to get trouble makers. Usually getting the entire stock crew lined up behind me dissuaded anyone from causing trouble. There was one night where things escalated before I could get backup and I was beaten up and had to go to the emergency room to get checked out. Around then I started taking Tae Kwon Do lessons after work with Von, one of my stockers. 

At some point I received a promotion to the position of "third man" and worked some shifts during the day. I still ran the stock crew two nights a week, but worked first and second shifts the other three work days. In those days there were fewer departments and therefore fewer managers. There was a store manager, assistant store manager and meat and produce department managers. There was no bakery, deli or floral department. Cashiers were overseen and scheduled by the store manager. There was no customer service counter or back office. The manager in charge of each shift counted out drawers and tallied up the cash and checks at the end of the shift (hardly anyone paid with credit cards). The  "third man" was kind of a fill-in, "gopher", position, responsible for ordering and filling the milk, keeping displays filled and covering for other managers on their days off, as well as working the second shift on occasion. Every Wednesday I substituted for Leonard, the Produce Manager. (it was during one of these Wednesdays that I discovered KZUM radio. I was working in the back room trimming lettuce and stumbled across Eli Rhoades' Jazz Fusion show). 

About halfway through my four-year stint at Food 4 Less I was given a raise and transferred to the store at 48th and Pioneers. The Night Manager at that store was apparently doing a bad job, so I became the Night Manager. That store had not yet switched over to being open 24 hours, so I assumed that I'd be working a similar shift to the one when I first became Night Manager at 48th & O. I assumed incorrectly. I was expected to cover not only the overnight stocking shift, but the second shift, starting at 4:00PM! Of course this schedule motivated me to get the truck stocked as quickly as possible, since any hours past midnight were essentially working for free. At first this was difficult to achieve. I inherited an unnecessarily large crew, many who had restrictions that made scheduling difficult. Two high school kids who couldn't work past midnight and would just leave at 12:00 with their aisles half done; a professional bowler who was only available on Tuesdays when he wasn't bowling; other people who had been promised no weekend shifts; friends of the owner's son...it went on and on. Most of the crew were lazy and slow. My solution was to be a hard-ass.

By "being a hard-ass" I mean strict enforcement of the rules. I got rid of the slackers by writing up and firing people for no-call/no-shows, lateness, insubordination, and anything else I could think of to cull the herd. Little by little the ones who didn't want to do the job either were fired or quit and I was left with a core of people who wanted to be there and were great stockers. Around this time the store was switched to being open 24 hours and I started coming in at 9:00PM instead of 4:00PM; the pressure to get done by midnight went away. One of my top people was Lonnie, who was literally a rocket scientist with several advanced degrees. He was fast and accurate - I could depend on him to get a lot done each night. Lee was a student from New Hampshire who had worked for me at my previous store. Lee's nickname was "Complete Bastard", after one of the characters on The Young Ones. There was Rudy, who at least once a night would run down an aisle and slide on his belly the rest of the way when he was done stocking an aisle. On paper we didn't have enough people to get the job done, but every one of them was head and shoulders above the average stocker. 

Then, as now, holidays were extra busy. One Thanksgiving Eve, when It was still starting at 4:00PM the lines stretched from the check stands to the back of the store. I'll never forget Ron, the Assistant Store Manager at the time, waving goodbye as he walked out in the midst of the chaos, leaving me to handle it. I swore that if I was ever in that position I'd never do that to anyone. 

A situation that I didn't have to deal with at my other store was the friends of the son of the company owner. Jeff was about my age (I was under 30 at the time) and was a partier, as were his friends. On several occasions they would come in late at night and ask me to cash checks for them. Of course, if Jeff was there I'd have to do it, but his buddies would act like the store was their personal bank. I always refused and would predictably get showered with abuse. After I complained to the owner, it stopped. 

Just because I had a great crew doesn't mean that we didn't occasionally get bad ones. We hired a guy named Tom who turned out to be one of the worst stockers I ever managed. After a few weeks Lonnie decided that he couldn't bear calling this guy the same name as me, so he renamed him "Erl". Where he came up with that name I'll never know, but it stuck. One of the things we did when running backstock was to put excess stock on the top of the warehouse shelving. Usually one stocker would stand up top while another would toss cases up to him. Erl frequently would toss boxes straight up only to have them fall back down and hit him in the face. Erl didn't last long. Another substandard stocker, Steve, decided that all of his problems were due to discrimination. I had to talk to him a number of times about working faster and he was catching flack from his coworkers who had to pick up the slack. One day he just didn't show up and we never saw him again. The next thing I knew we were being investigated by the Lincoln Human Rights Commission. Steve was a Native American. It may be hard to believe, but I had no idea that he was Native. Growing up I encountered a lot of different ethnic groups, but rarely Native Americans. So the idea that I was discriminating against him because he was Native American struck me as ridiculous. After the investigation started he stopped in one night to harangue me, calling me a "White Bastard". My crew started calling me "W.B." after that. We ended up being cleared of any wrongdoing. I'll never forget the answer that Lonnie gave the investigator when asked if I had ever demonstrated any prejudice in my dealing: "Nope, Tom just dislikes assholes". 

One notable adventure involved mice. One night while taking a break at the front of the store we noticed a parade of mice marching along the back aisle! Now most people don't realize that any business that sells food is going to have some rodents, but this was an invasion! The store manager started paying a bounty to anyone who could catch a mouse. A few of the stockers made quite a few bucks. 

Even though this wasn't what you'd call a rough neighborhood, we still had people coming in and causing trouble, usually teenagers. I never called the police on them, but chased them out and occasionally "escorted" them out physically. One such teenage boy returned with his father, who turned out to be a police officer. The father threatened and attempted to intimidate me, until one of the meat cutters, a huge man, walked out of the cutting room holding a large knife. That was the end of that.

As I mentioned in previous installments I had a violent streak in my younger days. One afternoon a belligerent customer shoved me during an argument. I grabbed him by the front of the shirt and threw him out (no punching involved). I didn't hear anything the next day, or the day after that, and assumed that nothing would come of it. It was an inventory weekend and on Monday morning I finished up the counting and filled in on a checkstand for an hour, something I normally did since the morning checker didn't come in until 7:00. When I went upstairs to collect my jacket I was fired. When I asked why he waited all weekend to fire me, Lyle, the store manager told me that he didn't have anyone else to run inventory and he needed me to check in the morning!

Since I hadn't burned any bridges after leaving the Omaha World-Herald I went straight to their office and asked for a job. Shannon, the office manager hired me on the spot for a part-time job. I then called Bud Trotter, who ran the floor cleaning service that cleaned and waxed Food 4 Less' floors. He also hired me on the spot. I was back to working two part-time jobs, but due to keeping good relations with a previous job, I was able to start work right away, with no intervening unemployment.