“If I fire two cashiers, I fix one store. I want to know if the whole house is sick, Ray.”
Silence. “How long?” “4 days.”
“And if someone recognizes you?” Harold almost laughed. “I just spent an hour in my own store. The woman behind the register looked me in the eye and told me to sit on the curb. Trust me, nobody in that building has ever looked at the about page.”
He spent the next 2 hours preparing. Trimmed his beard shorter, uneven the way a man looks when he doesn’t own a mirror he likes. Went to Goodwill and bought a gray polo, dark jeans, scuffed work shoes.
Then he printed the employee handbook and read all 40 pages for the first time in 2 years. What he found made him sit down. The customer experience protocol was detailed, specific. Greeting standards, service timelines, complaint resolution. All written out.
But there was no enforcement mechanism, no audits, no anonymous reporting channel. The entire protocol relied on one assumption, that people would follow it because it was right.
Harold closed the handbook. He thought about his mother, how she used to say, “Good intentions don’t survive bad management.” She was always right.
He pulled up the flagship shift schedule. Tiffany Grant and Jenna Moore were on every peak shift, Tuesday through Saturday, 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., the golden hours.
Emma Sullivan was scheduled for 5:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m., then 9:00 p.m. to close. Every single week for 4 months straight. The earliest mornings and the latest nights. No peak hours, no visibility, no tips worth counting. 4 months of dead zone shifts. That wasn’t bad luck. That was a pattern.
Harold put on the gray polo, laced the scuffed shoes. The man in the bathroom mirror didn’t look like the CEO of a 40-store chain. He looked like exactly the kind of person Tiffany Grant would tell to sit on the curb. Good.
He drove to the flagship and parked in the alley. The employee entrance was a narrow metal door, paint chipping, no camera. The difference between the Instagram perfect storefront and this neglected back door told him everything about where this company’s attention had gone.
