Assistant Store Managers - After all they are ASSES!

Over my 20+ career in retail, I have worked with a lot of Assistant Managers.  Some have been wonderful and others have been just wonders as in "I wonder what the hell the company was thinking when they were hired!".

Way back in the Woolworth days over 20 years ago, I had the privilege to work with Warren.  He was the kindest manager one could ever meet. He was fun to be around, never yelled, and always seemed happy.  Maybe it was because he always wore these high quality 2 and 3 -piece suits that always made him feel so giddy.  It was amazing that he could be so happy working with angry Bernie. I guess it helped they never talked to each other.

After Warren left the company, we got Chuck.  He came from the former Portsmouth, NH store after it closed.  Anybody who ever went there during the last couple of years like I did, they would wonder why this location lasted as long as it did.  It looked and felt like a store out of something of early 1970's.  Chuck was a nice guy as well who kept us entertained during the end of Bernie's stay and through about half of Mikey's stay.  After Chuck, we no longer had anyone who had the official title as "Assistant Store Manager" as the company was slowly dying off.

At HQ, I never met anyone with that title and probably it was a good thing given the entire environment there.

At Staples as previously mentioned, a couple of the assistant store managers graduated to the position of Store Manager eventually.  However, the attitude of these people changed dramatically between the two positions.  At one point the company even wanted to eliminate the position from our store because they felt it was not needed.  Maybe, they should have done that.  Especially given that the final assistant store manager I dealt with was the worse I ever had.  The name of this person is Abe Madrid.  What made Abe a bad assistant store manager was that he came from the same store as Shawn Nichols did in Bangor Maine.  These two together created a very bad environment as they worked against the employees in every way possible as I will be explaining in future posts.  Bad + Bad = EVIL (VERY EVIL}.

Next Up:  And the Rest Here on Retail Island!