The Retail Store Clerk Version
Close behind flipping burgers would be the almost equally maligned “retail store clerk”. Marcus Buckingham shares the inspiring story of Tami Heim in his fantastic book, The One Thing You Need To Know. Buckingham begins:
Tami always had a fascination with stores. So great was her fascination that by the age of twelve she knew she wanted to go into retail. Actually, that is not entirely true. She started playing store with her friends much earlier than that. But it was only as she reached age twelve that she started talking about it seriously.
She was urged by her uncle, at age sixteen, to test out her fascination by apply at a local department store. She applied at Lazarus in her hometown of Indianapolis. She was told they weren’t hiring any part timers, but because she was unclear what part-time meant she sat in the waiting room all day in hopes she would get hired. She was finally granted an interview with the operations manager and her passion won him over.
At first she got all the tough jobs to show her that retail in real life wasn’t all fun and games. But Tami says she was addicted from the get go. She loved the immediate feed back of retail where if you change or move a display you can see right away if it worked. She loved the theater of it, the drama of every day putting on a show for thousands of customers. As she puts it, “I just couldn’t imagine anything more exciting than coming in every day and having a chance to do that.”
She worked at the store all the way through high school and through her years studying retail management at Purdue University. After graduation she was placed in a management training program and steadily moved up through the ranks from department manager, to manager of a small store, then manager of a larger store. There were setbacks along the way. Her parent company went into bankruptcy but through it all she maintained her passion.
Then one day Borders called. She was first hired as one of there territorial vice-presidents responsible for the western U.S. Only two years later she was asked to assume the role of company president. During her tenure profits shot up and the stock price grew 66%.
Let’s establish once and for all, the only dead end job is the one you are not talented for and passionate about.
Patrick McCarthy arrived at a then small regional seven-store retail chain in 1971 at the age of 26. He had found his former job as a prison counselor frustrating and mentally draining and was looking for something he might have a better aptitude for.
Unfortunately he was ill prepared for the job and as he says, “I made every mistake in the book”. As a beginner in the men’s clothing department he knew nothing about clothes and had know personal style. He wore his shirts too big, he didn’t know how to fold garments for display, and knew nothing of how to coordinate color and texture. Worse...after working at Nordstrom for less than two years, he had developed a reputation for being uncooperative, hard to manage, and not a team player.
But then things began to shift. He found a mentor by the name of Ray Black. A manager by the name of Patrick Kennedy took McCarthy under his wing and began to develop him. McCarthy says, about his 7th year his business started to come together an take off. At one point his client list included 40 lawyers from one firm alone.
After 30 years Patrick McCarthy retired in 2001 as Nordstrom’s All-Time Top Salesman. In fact… for 15 consecutive years, he was the number one salesperson through out the entire chain. If you feel a tug toward retail, I can think of no better primer than a book he co-wrote with Robert Spector titled The Nordstrom Way.
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