Retail Diaries … Part 3

By Patricia Racine

September 2025

In a perfect world, hiring and managing employees would be easy and harmonious. Every day would be like the one when my favorite girl texted me to share that she was finally able to open her banana all by herself, a momentous accomplishment for the seventeen year old. But more often than not you are working with people who drive you up the wall and test your patience at every step; and most of the time it’s the adults who give you the most issues. 

Granted the adult employees have their schedules mapped out for the next twelve months, unlike teenagers who drop their two week vacation on you the day before they are leaving with a “my mom just told me …” But sometimes those adults are more childish than the kids. You are trapped by the fact that you really don’t like them as a person but can’t deny that they do a good job in their position which frees you up to do other tasks.

The other problem is that in a small town of about 1,600 people you sometimes have to take what you can get; pickings are slim in Otis. The last few summers I had been recruiting for summer employees in towns twenty miles away. Unfortunately, the dynamic of Otis has changed. The people coming during the busy season are not bringing their offspring to work a summer job, a group that we had gotten some fantastic employees from in the past (shout out to my Big Pond kids!)

It’s stressful staring down a busy season without a full staff so when the little Goth girl walks in you take her because she is polite and personable over the grown woman who says she can only work weekdays nine till three or the one who calls out because her kid is constantly sick. Or do you keep the grown woman who had an existential crisis and quit multiple times, and had a nuclear meltdown on you for absolutely no reason like a toddler, because she is good at her job? But then sometimes you take a bullet because you have had enough of the toxic woman who bullied the younger employees and was rude to customers, though only when you were off for the day. That bullet being that you were intending on letting them go but they pulled the trigger and quit before you got two minutes into your conversation. Personally, I call that a check mark in the win column for me.

It's a very difficult place to be in mentally when you dread going to work because of people who make it their job to cause you stress. Needless to say, once I handed the keys of the store over to the new owners, I blocked quite a few former employees because of how much stress they caused me; and I do not regret it in the least. When you bend over backward and pay someone a very good wage for a basic level position and they still treat and talk about you horribly, they are the problem and, unfortunately, must be left behind. But my kids, oh my kids, I can forgive them for the stupid things they did because they have given me more laughter and pride than stress.

This is the ugly side of running a small business, but it needs to be shared. Everyone wants to have their own business and it is probably great if you have no other people working with you; but once you throw in the human element it gets really messy and in my humble opinion, not worth the stress … Better to be a cook than a chef.