I was reading a blog earlier and of course being today they were talking about 9/11 and it's aftermath. The blogger mentioned how it effected people, emotionally, physically, and financaly. And that made me think about something.
Back on 9/11 I was working for a retail company called Service Merchandise. I was a store manager. We sold jewelry, kitchen ware, electonics and a few other things. If you're from the North you probably never heard of us, we were a chain based in the South. We're weren't Walmart size, I think we had a few hundred stores at that time. We were in the midst of a downturn, on 9/11 we were two years into a three year bankruptcy plan. Actually we were going towards the last six months of the third year at that time.
The first two years we had exceeded the plans the bankruptcy court had laid out for us. The goals looked good for us. Word was that we were going to come out of this on the side of good.
Now a lot of stores depend on Christmas for a good majority of their profits for the year. Service had two big spikes in the year. Mother's Day was a big one for us, but Christmas was by far the big one. We did between 70 and 80 percent of our profit for the entire year in the month of December.
Does anyone remember how retail business fared after 9/11? Things went bad very quickly. I don't think anyone had a good Christmas that year as far as retail goes. Including us. Our Christmas sucked. And that January we were on a conference call with the CEO of the company when he announced that by the end of the day they were going to issue a press release that said Service Merchandise was going out of business and closing its doors for good.
I truly belive that 9/11 caused us to close our doors for good. You might think that one bad Christmas shouldn't effect us that much and we couldn't be doing that good if it did. Well in bankruptcy we couldn't afford to have one bad Christmas, yes we were doing very well up to that point, but if you're already battling to keep the beasts at bay you can't afford to slip, even a little. And with the dismal Christmas season we had we slipped. We slipped big time.
I ended up losing my job of course, a company I had worked at for over twenty years, so did thousands of others when we finally closed the door in March for good.
Now I don't want to compare this to all those that lost their lives on that day. What happened to us was nothing in comparsion. But 9/11 caused more that day, effected more lives in more ways than a lot of people think about. And this was one way.
2 comments:
Totally. I work retail also, and even up here in Canada retail sales were affected. I think fear is a huge deterrent; meaning fear of terrorism, sometimes fear of econimic stability when jobs are scarce, yada yada. Look at today- no threat of local terrorism, excellent economy, and the result is retail growth. Yep, definitely all connected.
I miss that place and all the people :(
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