Saturday morning, I got up, curled my hair like it was a work day, put on my good church slacks, and drove down to Rogers Avenue, and I did not go into that store.
I set up in the grass strip by the church lot across the street. Folding table, lawn chair, a coffee can with sixty dollars of my own money in it, and a piece of poster board my granddaughter lettered for me.
SHORT AT THE REGISTER? COME SEE ME.
That is all it said. I sat out there from nine in the morning until the hot dogs ran out.
Eleven people came over. Two of them cried, and one was a young man buying formula who would not look at me, and I made a point of not looking at him either.
By noon that can had four hundred and some dollars in it, because folks kept putting money in instead of taking it out, and I have never been so bad at running anything in my life.
The old gentleman came at one with his dog in the car. He had gone home Tuesday and figured out my name off the receipt.
Now here is the part that finished it, and it did not come from me.
Sonya on register nine took a picture of the break room wall Tuesday night and sent it around. There is a framed page on that wall that has hung since the store opened and everybody has stopped seeing, and the company reprinted it for the anniversary display in the vestibule without one person reading it.
It is the first store manager’s memo to the front end, October of 1999.
To the front end: if a customer comes up short, use your judgment and fix it. I would rather explain eleven dollars to Bentonville than watch a neighbor put the eggs back. Nobody gets written up for that in this store. Not now and not ever.
R. Vandiver. He died in 2013. That memo had been hanging eleven feet from the table where a twenty-six-year-old told me I was labor.
The regional VP read it off a phone in the vestibule under a banner that said thank you for twenty-five years, with a Channel 5 camera forty feet away.
They called me Monday. Reinstated, back pay, all of it, and somebody upstairs wanted the young man moved out of that store.
I said no to that part. He is twenty-six, somebody handed him a policy app and a quota and never handed him that memo, and moving him just makes him somebody else’s problem.
What I asked for was the memo retyped and taped up at every register on that front end. It is at all twenty-two of them. Mine is at register six, where I have been since the ninth.
The can is still under my register. It is not company money and I keep the receipts separate, and nobody has said a word to me about it.
A young man told me I was not family, I was labor. The man who opened that store wrote down what he thought about that in 1999, and they had it framed on the wall the entire time, and they were about to hang it in the lobby to celebrate themselves.