One Over X News

Second Installment of Noh Bahdi

The Mavericks:

Even though I am no longer with The Orange Giant from time to time I still mention the innovative concepts that I learned while I was working for them. Their approach was a radical departure from the conventional wisdom of retailing. The Orange Giant worshipped no sacred-cow concepts of how things should be done. In fact I think some of the original mavericks in the company wanted to rewrite the rules of retailing. They had a frontier mentality. We were doing something unique. We were doing it the right way. It was almost evangelistic. Damn the bean counters! We were putting people and customers ahead of profit just to see if the profits would take care of themselves. Guess what, the profits soared.

Honestly, I was a mid-term maverick at best. I started with the company in 1987. The company was 8 years old. We were between a $1/2 billion and $1 billion a year in sales as a corporation and we were listed on the New York Stock Exchange. The Orange Giant had already made quite an impact and a lot of noise long before I came on board.

I had just left the military after a strange 4-years-and-one-month of service. I had tried selling software for a telemarketer, wasting a whole month of my life. The only good from that experience was having found a restaurant in downtown Clearwater, FL that had the best Cuban sandwiches and some incredible espresso.

I interviewed with The Orange Giant on the morning of Friday May 1, 1987. I had just moved into a home that my father had helped me build. I needed things for the house and my father told me The Orange Giant was the cheapest place around.

While I was there I mentioned to a salesperson that I was sort of between jobs. He told me they were looking for people for the garden department. So he took me to the front desk and I filled out an application and handed it to the clerk at the counter, she went over it and immediately called for a supervisor from the ceiling fan department to come meet me. She gave me an interview on the spot. That really impressed me.

The interview went well so she gave me a strange test disguised as an opinion survey. She told me to answer extreme either one way or the other. When she scored that she came back to me with a tall, skinny Black man, named Willie who was an Assistant Store Manager. He asked me a few questions but the only one that stands out it my mind was why I wanted to work for The Orange Giant
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“I am a hard worker and I will work cheap until I prove myself. I will make this store money.”

“Well, then okay,” Willie said. “I’ll go over this with Paula. She is looking for people. I can’t promise anything but she will probably be calling you back to give you that chance.”

I gave my father’s phone number as my number was not yet in service. I went back home and started a project only to have my father come over to the house and tell me The Orange Giant called me, asking me if I could call them back. I went over to my father’s house and returned the call.

“Oh yeah, Noh-Bahdi. Hold on, please.”

After five minutes, someone named Paula came to the phone, “Hey, I looked over your resume and application. You said you would work hard and work cheap to prove yourself. I like that. Can you start now?”

“Now as in right now?”

“When can you get here? I really need your help.”

“I can be there by 1 o’clock maybe a few minutes later.”

“That would be great. Listen, dress to work. We have pallets of stuff to put away and I have been short-handed for a while.”

“Okay.”

“Well, if you work out this company is growing fast. You can really advance as high as you want to go. You have the education that I lack, so you have that going for you. Just grunt for a while and you can be where I am in no time.”

“That sounds great. Let me get some decent clothes on.”

“Collared shirt and jeans is fine. See ya in a few. I gotta run. Ask for me at the desk when you get here.”

That was how my career began with The Orange Giant. My orientation was a week or so later, when they had enough survivors to make it worthwhile to take a manager off the floor for a couple of days to go over everything.

My early impressions were mixed. I was amazed at what I saw, and wondered how they could be making money. Yet they had the foot traffic. No popular product lingered long. I was bringing an indoor roach killer tot eh front of the store by the time I had opened enough boxes for customers that half of the pallet was gone.

I am glad that I had the experience of military training just prior to working for The Orange Giant. A normal day was bad enough, whenever they broke a sale it was a war zone.

I had believed that the original Clearwater store, #41 (later #241 and finally, before they relocated it #0241) was huge. I learned that it was among the smallest in the chain of then 63 stores. Yes that was how small The Orange Giant was when I began with them. We had a few stores scattered here and there in Florida, Georgia, Texas, Arizona and California.

The Clearwater store was a mere 67,000 square feet. The average store at that time was closer to 80,000. New stores were being built that were 87,000 to 95,000 square feet. There were plans to build 105,000 square foot stores!

It was probably well for me to learn The Orange Giant culture in a smaller store. I had to become creative in my merchandising even as a salesperson. I had to respect the shelf allocation and down-stock whenever the supply diminished. These were crucial disciplines to acquire.

My first few weeks were an awakening. I had never been as tired as I was when I got home. My first three days with the company I earned overtime! I worked 47 hours in the first three days, 47 out of a possible 72 hours or 65% of my first weekend with the company I was at work, more than twice the full time norm.



The Opportunity:

Paula worked me to death, really. Had I been in her shoes in management at the time I might have done the same. She threw things at me that she never expected me to accomplish. I had no idea or preconception as to what was possible. I simply did whatever I had to do.

My very first day I applied SKU (Store Keeping Unit) tags to a pile of brooms and put away half of the grills and lawn mowers while the guy that was supposed to be helping me was a lunch. When he returned he said he was going to like working with me.

There were times that I was frustrated beyond belief. There were days that I was certain I was going to quit. Still, I had a family to support. That was really the only reason I was there. It was the only reason I didn’t tell some of the management what I thought of them.

As the season in Garden wound down I could see what was happening. The only other guy in the department that stayed busy all the time was Irish. He was transferred to the plumbing, and a couple of other guys were terminated. At least I was still there but I was in fear of my job. On my first review Paula gave me a whole 25-cent-an-hour raise, which I was told was the highest I could get at 90 days.

She was really taking advantage of me, I knew. There were people in the store, in my department that made more than I was earning and hardly did any work at all. One of the two department supervisors was basically useless. He did nothing but carrying papers around and pretending to be ordering things. I say ‘pretending’ because whatever he was doing, none of the product that we were chronically out of ever seemed to come in.

When I reached my 6-month review I got another 25-cent-an-hour increase. I was making a whole $6-an-hour. By then Irish had been promoted to department supervisor of plumbing. Even though we weren’t supposed to know what others made, I knew that he was making a lot more than me. I had no problem with that as he was a good man and a hard worker. He had negotiated for a higher starting wage. I was stupid and I needed a job.

One of the few smart things that I did was buy stock in the employee purchase plan. A few days after the plan began the market collapsed so they let all of us out and we bought into a new plan at a much lower price. Besides that my father had bought stock in the company and even some shares for me.

Over the course of the first six months I had done anything I could, working overtime because I needed the money, even doing the work that others left undone so that the department looked good. Even as they removed people from the staffing due to cutbacks I was there busting my ass and getting it all done. I had figured that was appreciated. Yeah, well I got a whole 25 cent an hour increase. My family never saw me; every muscle I had ached; and I was probably the best goddamned salesperson they had ever hired.

I had to do something for my family. I interviewed for other jobs and was offered a management trainee position with a major drug store chain. I accepted and even had a start date. I had turned in my letter of resignation. Wallace, the store manager at the time had said, “Okay, good luck to you then.”

It was sort of an unwritten policy that whenever someone resigned, they were terminated immediately. In my case they let me work out my two weeks. I worked as hard if not harder than I ever had. Despite my decision to leave it had nothing to do with anything but the money I was making. As the store still needed to terminate some people I suppose that my leaving allowed someone else to keep his or her job.

It was my last day. I had cleaned and down-stocked the shovels because it needed it. In fact my entire last to weeks I had fixed problems that had been ignored for months while the department was busy. I busted my ass not because I cared about the people I was leaving behind. I have always wanted to leave had a mess to deal with and whatever I fixed they didn’t have to.

I was a mess and filthy when the store manager paged me into his office and asked me to close the door behind me.

“Why are you leaving, really?” He asked even before I had sat down.

“It is not about the work or the people. I like being here. It is all about money. I have a house, a wife and a kid. I cannot make it on what I am being paid. I was told that if I busted my ass I would be remarked. Two 25-cent-an-hour increases isn’t much, sir.”

“Well, Noh, Irish came in here today and told me that you are the garden department and if I am stupid enough to let you go I need to be fired.”

I smiled, “Irish is a good man.”

“Yes he is. He thinks highly of you. Why are you leaving?”

“I cannot pay the bills. I started out low because I was having trouble finding a job. Everyone looked at my education and said they couldn’t afford me or they thought I’d work for a while and then find something better.”

“Like you’re doing now.”

“I suppose it looks like that. But I don’t think I have been fairly compensated either. I was willing to work cheap until I proved myself. I think I have proved myself. I am making 50-cents-an-hour more than when I started and that might be a decent increase except that my starting wage was so low.”

“So it is really just the money.”

“Yeah, otherwise I like working here. It’s crazy at times but it is never dull. I like the people here.”

“Listen what would it take for me to get you to stay with us?”

“Well the drug store will pay me some of what they call Chinese overtime on top of my salary but while I am in training it is actually the same pay as I am making now. After the six weeks it is a significant bump.”

“Okay what do you need right now to stay with us?”

“I have to have a dollar-an-hour increase just to pay bills.”

He wrote a figure on an ‘action notice’ which was a document that changed anything to do with personnel status. He flipped it around and I saw he had added 50-cents-an-hour to what I had just told him I needed. “You can do that?”

“It is unusual. I’m the store manager, though. I have to justify every expense but in this company a store manager has a lot of power and control as long as the store is making money. You’ll see when you get there. That’s why I am doing it. It is an investment as I see it. You’ll produce and pay for it. I’ll get George to sign off on it. Anyway, that is my problem not yours but you damn well better be worth it. I need you to be ready within the month to run a department. That is what I expect now. You think you are worth more then you need to show me.”

About two weeks after that the supervisor of the furniture department quit and Wallace promoted me. We walked the department and he pointed out what was wrong. As my first task he told me that he needed me to re-merchandise the department. I had five sides of aisles sandwiched between Hardware and Paint. I had to display everything we carried and store it in such a way that it was shop-able.

My senior sales person named Tony was an almost stereotypical New York City Italian.
At the time Tony had been with the company for five years. I wondered and even worried about why the department had not been offered to him. So the first thing I did after Wallace returned to his office was to walk the sales floor with Tony, pretty-much inch by inch and I listened. I let him show me, tell me what sold, show me what the issues and impediments were that kept him from selling more product.

I knew next to nothing about furniture. Tony knew everything and took pride in it.
He told me he loved selling and that was why he had turned down offers to run the department so often that now they didn’t even bother to ask him.

His life revolved around a few things. He was a Yankees fan, so baseball season was extremely important. Although he was single, his family was also very important to him. He also promised me that I would get promoted if I listened to him. The people that had run the department, the people that he had trained were now store managers.

It might seem like Tony was full of himself but it was hard to talk to him for even two or three minutes and not love and respect the guy. It became obvious to me why he was a good salesperson. He exuded sincerity and confidence. He was exactly what he wanted to be and enjoyed doing what he did. It also became obvious that like most sales people he was disorganized, something of which he was well aware. It was probably the real reason he did not want to manage.

I learned more from following him around in The Orange Giant furniture department for a weekend than I have learned about selling from anyone else in my lifetime. In the course of that weekend he also told me what he needed to be done in order that he could sell more products. He had some very good ideas and although his merchandising ideas were a little vague I could visualize what he was suggesting.

At home at night I drew up a bay by bay floor plan for the department. When I worked I measured every box and display. I calculated clearances and tolerances and drew frontal diagrams of how each bay should be arranged.

When I had finished I went over it with Tony and discussed it, made a few amendments and redrew a few things before finally receiving his blessing. In that way I had made certain that I was not forgetting anything.

Tony said that I did good work and that the way I was laying out the department was almost exactly what he had envisioned.

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posted by Unknown @ 8:33 PM