Think?

I don't know why I slip away from Zen from time to time. I'm leaving the shop the other day and see a bar patron outside of the bar, on the cell, and with her drink glass on my truck. To elicit a response, I say, "Get your drink off my bar". She exits her call, turns, and becomes defensive. No sense of humor. I'm met with lots of, "Do you think I'm...". Oh, you want to know what I think. I think you wouldn't be amused if I showed up with my drink on your car. I think you have no respect for anything in the area, like everything around her is part of some alcohol playground. I think you're only here to be able to say where you are to people on the cell who aren't here. I think... crap... I say, "I think you're a pretentious bitch. I think you don't care and should go back to drinking". Not very nice and absent Zen.
LCDTV took a header biking out in Baton Rouge. Blown up wrist and cracked helmet and many impact abrasions. Man down! Warrior is out for a week starting a day before I get back from my second break of the year. I doubt I'll take anymore strings of days off until Winter. Phantom has his helmet cam back in action. I like the videos, very realistic. Red dog got a new collar.
Today a client comes in with her 50 lb. trike loaded down with 60+ lbs. of art type stuff. She has a flat and before exploring common occurrences like punctures, she is convinced that we installed the wrong size tube the last time we changed her tube. There is no vocal reply that would be effective, this is only resolved though demonstration. Funny when I show her the little piece of wire poking through the tire. No slight of hand, and a guarantee that she will be charged if we're not at fault, she is cornered and ought to pay extra for the immediate service. I feel that the flat occurred during a period which within some grace from the original repair and charge her only for the tube. If I had been thinking, I would have weighed the option for ending commerce with this person and saving future drama as is likely to happen with this client. Command performances with great explanation are tiring and unprofitable. The catch-22 of doing business in NOLA. xx% of the people here are poor. You can choose to price them out of your store or slide your scale to provide them with help they really could use. The downside is they open cans of worms on you and return too frequently and take time you could spend on people with money. If only those of little means could have little expectations or maybe some patience? I try to respect everyone as individuals. Reality is different in a business. Most clients are appreciative and respectful. It's hard not to toss out the fringe clients when they abandon their bikes, steal your time without ever intending to buy something, and otherwise assume we're the reason their bikes don't work or that we're rich. I think that everyone is prejudiced about everyone else and in some way, play out their position regardless of reality. Well almost everyone. I guess this is my prejudice. It's just a supposition.

The Victims

We get some characters. One guy FG, smelled like urine on the stove and was checking out a bag, saying, "I know what some of these pockets are for, but this is must be where you put your crack pipe". I agreed with him. There is a group who MO is to spend your time asking baited questions until you either lose time with no sale or ignore them or kick them out. One guy pulled the infinite questions while on his cell phone and due to his odor was overheard saying, "I can't believe this guy is spraying me with lysol", to the person he was on the phone with as I am kicking him out.
Our typical customer varies from the "INNERTUBE!" guy, that's his greeting, to those pulling out bikes from the past to find out how close to the price of a replacement bicycle a full repair cost will get. Others are browsing for a gift, the second most popular purchase is a lock. Rental customers have many categories. Follow this - Go to a different city, walk in to a bike shop, ask to rent a bike, and then ask them if there are any nice places to ride around here. Kind of like renting a car and asking if there are any nice places to drive or going to a pharmacy, buy some condoms and asking the cashier if they know of anyone who might like to have sex. My favorite customers are trained that we won't wantonly take advantage of them and generally trust us to spend their money wisely. I don't mind skepticism, but negativity and cynicism get old really quickly.
So who are the victims. Well some victims come in and want as much as they can get for nothing. Others want a realy nice, light, fast bike that costs less than $300. Wow, me too. The best victims are the ones with a bike that's on life support who want some minor repair affected and it can't be performed without some liability issue. Catch-22. No work, no money, or lots of work, still bad bike, still no money. The lesser experienced are sometimes taken in by what seems like an easy job. If we could screen out those with less than $10 on them when thay came in... You don't have to buy anything, just have the $10.
More than 85% of our customers are fun, freindly people who know how business works and easily do commerce. But it sometimes seems that 85% of our time is spent on the 15% pain in the butt, no money having, stinky bums and otherwise uncivilized children and adult children.
A few of them can be fun and I even like some of them. I always hope that one day, they'll wake up and begin contributing something to the community, like commerce or polite behavior.

Missing man formation

So as is it to pass that the gypsy, the bird and Zoltan will be absent for some time. The bird is out in a week, gypsy left last month, and Zoltan starts a new job in the fall. This week the boss is out as is the Phantom. The Phantom is the best man for the jobs he takes. Bringing order and good retail sense to an otherwise cluttered hobby den. He has done more to increase profitability and does it with some permanence. He discounts his role to some extent, but we know when he's been somewhere.
With all the missing souls, how do we run a bike shop? I can't see us not burning out a bit before we recover some staff members or hire (and get up to speed) some fresh meat. We always thought it would get easier with more employees and maybe that can be true, though so far that is not the case. This doesn't mean it was easier before, just more controlled and paced for reality. We have no idea how much or how little we can schedule in a day without disappointing someone at the beginning or end of a sale. This shows our inability to effectively communicate our current workload with each other. Instead of knowing ahead of time who has time for what, we drop our pants in front of the customer while we hash out reality and allow undue influence by the money bringers. Thus by inference, we care both too little and too much. And for now, there are less of us to do either.

The power of purpose

I love my boss. Otherwise my job would cease to be meaningful. He has a special place of business with some of the greatest people in the world as employees, friends, and clients. I work at a bicycle store. We service a great many cyclists in the New Orleans area. Stories abound of jobs where the pay is good but the toll on the soul leads to unhappiness. Not that I'm always happy, yet it is more often then not, our days are joyous and filled with humor.
I started working here about fifteen years ago. My employment history was mostly service oriented. I worked as a gardener, in a credit and catalog dept., as a busboy and bartender, and did some odd jobs for cash here and there. I am fiercely loyal and had been shopping at this store for 5 or 6 years before I approached them about work. The shop has had its struggles and schisms along the way and I think we've made it through the worst. Being nearly bankrupt in the mid 90's , we battled for over three years just to get back to even. Our best year ever was interrupted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and still we returned to banner sales.
The philosophy is simple: treat people with genuine interest and serve them as guests in your home. We've all been to a business where we were ignored, pestered, or treated like crap. We don't want that to be how we are viewed and quite the opposite, we want our clients to feel our honesty and devotion to our craft. We make some of the finest bicycles in the world and are willing to fix just about anything. I goes to say that some folks will try to take advantage of the easy-going nature of the shop and we'll put up with it for a while. I won't pretend I've never asked someone to leave, met young children at door to explain why they're unwelcome without their parents, or spraying Lysol® on extremely unhygienic bums and gutter punks. What I will say is we're quite tolerant of the wide range of beliefs and practices of our customers and consider everyone's individual preferences when they pay us a visit.