Revenues soar when she minds the store
By Joanne Sherman

My friends own a store. It's one of those big old stores with a wooden floor and tall shelves that sells things like waders, panty hose, sweatshirts, teapots, bedspreads, corks, alarm clocks and my favorite item, fudge.

Last week they had to be away for a day and weren't able to get someone to "watch the store." Good friend and as fond of fudge as I am (not necessarily in that order) I volunteered. When they suggested that maybe they'd be better off just closing the store, I insisted. I mean, how hard could it be? People would buy stuff; I would put it in a bag and take their money.

The day before they left I was given a crash course on how to work the cash register, the radio and the fudge scale. It took a long time to learn the fudge scale because when one of them would cut a piece of fudge and weigh it, I'd grab the fudge, stick it in my mouth then ask to be shown the procedure one more time.

The next morning I skipped breakfast. Who needed bran when there was six pounds of fresh walnut pecan sitting under glass waiting for me? When my first customer came to the counter, I tried to ring $1.10 into the cash register. Instead of the cha-ching! of a happy cash register, I got the sound contestants on Jeopardy hear when they don't put their answers in the form of a question. By then, another customer was at the counter.

I kept trying but to no avail. The customers, both with cashier experience, came behind the counter to help me and to prove that three brains are not better than one. I figured out how to get the cash drawer open and completed the transactions by hand. Let me tell you something, multiplying the cost of an item by .0825 sales tax gave me such a headache I had to buy myself some aspirin. Fortunately, there's no tax on aspirin.

During a lull, I called a friend who owns another store for help. She left her store, came over to "mine," punched in a sale and it worked. My mistake? I thought the machine wanted me to put in the decimal point, I forgot today's cash registers like to do that themselves. But I'm grateful I live in a town where one storekeeper will leave her shop to rescue someone in another store. And I sold her a pink zipper and three buttons.

One customer wanted material that you stuff into dolls. It's kept on the top shelf. The top shelf was about eight feet over my head. The woman who's bought doll stuffing there before said, "You don't have to climb up the shelves, I'll do it."

"Whoa!" I told her, "I'm the store person here. I'm the one who gets to do all the climbing."

I didn't have to actually climb up the shelves; there's a wooden ladder that slides along a horizontal pole. I slid it over, then climbed. The bag of stuffing was a lot higher than it looked from the ground. I tugged on it causing about six other bags to come tumbling down. To get them back I'd have had to climb one rung higher. I decided that as a temp, going any higher was not in my job description, so I stuffed them behind merchandise on a lower shelf.

During my stint as storekeeper, I sold sneakers, a few rain slickers, a backpack, jockey shorts, a hand mirror, several pairs of sweats, light bulbs, five feet of oilcloth, one yard of hem binding and lots of odds and ends. Of course, I told everyone that I wasn't the regular storekeeper, not that it was even necessary to actually tell customers that since most conversations went, "Do you carry (fill in the blank)?" and my response was, "Gosh, I don't know, have you ever seen any (blank) here before?"

I was so busy I never even had the chance to sample one piece of fudge. But I had fun that day, and at the end of it the cash register totaled $124,566.32.

Not bad for a temp.