Look Shiny!!!

Good Morning... What can I get for you?

As a new store manager (and being a younger fella at the time) I had an enthusiasm for the details in my store. The backroom had to be spotless most of the time... the front of the store had to be tidy... including the huge windows out front... the mop sink HAD to be clean enough to eat out of...

The detailing that stands out the most in that store was the oiling of the wood work. When I got to the store, the large, cherry backdrop was dull and dusty... the wood was dry as well. So... one night, during our pizza/inventory night I set about oiling the hell out of the wood. It soaked up more wood oil that a standard Starbucks "paid out" would cover... so I dipped into my wallet and bought more... and oiled and oiled until my anal retentive heart was happy.

That store gleamed... and I was happy.

The next morning... every single customer walked into the store made mention of the wall and how "new" it looked. My partners got quite a kick out of telling the story of me looking like a greasy McDonald's fry bag. I didn't realize how infectious my affinity for "the shiny" would become.

A couple of months later, one of my closing shifts had a conversation with the maintenance cleaning folks... she asked them to wax the floors. It wasn't something we'd asked for in the past, but they agreed to do it... and it was part of our contract that they deep cleaned the floors. So, the waxed...

The next morning we came into the shiniest, cleanest looking floors you ever saw... and all was right in the world.

It didn't stop there though... a different shift supervisor (who used to work in a bike shop) remembered that Simichrome Polish really gleamed up anything with chrome on it... and since we still had a LaMarzocco, he thought... why not? It was the most beautiful thing I ever saw. So shiny... I like to think it was the original High Definition.

So, in that first store it became a tradition to find an item that had never been cared for the way it really should have been and detail it out... so you could hear the partners say, "Look Shiny!!" the next day.

We'll see you tomorrow for your usual...

Pat Nerr...