I'm Tired- Quit Raining on My Parade!

I'm tired. I woke up this morning and was tired. I'm tired most of the days, tired when I come home from work and then spend a good portion of my night awake, drowning in issues that churn and churn without resolve.

Lately, I have come to the conclusion that very little interests me anymore. I do not look forward to being with my key people, nor going places or even acquiring new things. I guess I get my fill of that by owning a retail store. But still, everything is making me tired. Life has become blase, not that interesting to me. Maybe life and this world is simply tired of me too!

The latest "rain on my parade" has come today from a local news weekly called AltDaily printed and distributed here in good old Hampton roads with it's primary distribution in Norfolk, Virginia. I had written a pissy email to the editor a few months back about an article titled "The Guide to Olde Towne Portsmouth," or something close to that. Anyway, they wrote as usual about the museums, local entertainment and eateries, but left out the shopping aspect of our beloved Olde towne. So, my question to them was: "how can this be the guide to Olde towne if you have only covered certain parts of it?" They suggested writing a follow-up article that would include our unique boutiques and Olde Towne shoppes.

Last night I received a Facebook notification from an author that stated that they just published a feature story in AltDaily titled "50 Reasons I Love Portsmouth and You Should Too." So I read the article, a wonderful review about our fair city, it's people, places to go and things to do etc., and there we were listed in full glory below an image of a James Buttersworth painting, an inclusion in the article but once again with the name of our business spelled incorrectly!

Arrgh!

Now typically, I would "calmly" write the editor and ask "nicely" for them to correct the miss-spelling and get on with it, but this is the second time within the last year that our business was mentioned by this publication and our business name spelled incorrectly. Okay, not a big deal you say, but actually to me it is. When a writer produces a quality story, they should always take the time to edit and make sure that all facts and spellings are correct. What writers typically do not understand is that anyone who runs a business and works pretty much 7 days a week like we do trying to produce a great business for shoppers like you to enjoy for more than a decade, takes pride in their accomplishments and should receive even the ground level of respect to get the business name right. So, I wrote a very unkind notification back to the author, blasting her for her misgivings and then pursued to write a similar negative comment on AltDaily's article. The editor was certainly not happy with my response and suggested that maybe they should remove our business from their story. "Fine, go ahead" I responded and continued to ramp with all cannons firing at an attempt to stress my point. Arrgh!

Now again, I'm really tired and confronted with another sleepless night from this damn article churning once again through my mind. You know, sometimes after all is said and done, we find that the effort is simply not worth it. Maybe we should just turn our store into another "I don't gives a shit" junk shop, or better yet just close down the old brick and mortar part of our business once and for all and go 'web only' like so many of my competitors have done. That way there would be no store for anyone to maybe visit or maybe write about and of course no chance in misspelling our business name!

We recently had that choice dangling in front of us like a bone in front of a rabid dog. Our previous riverfront location building was sold last year and we became faced with an overwhelming choice of either relocating our business or just going web only. We looked at new locations up and down the eastern seaboard from Massachusetts to Florida and almost packed up and moved to Savannah, GA., but someone had just beaten us  by a few weeks to a perfect riverfront warehouse store location, so after all of our 6 months of hunting, we decided to stay put here in Olde Towne and relocate our store to another building on High Street (and that's a whole different story). This is our fourth (and final) location since our meager beginnings that started years ago in Virginia Beach. So here we are, now located directly across the street from our original Olde Towne location, destroyed by the city of Portsmouth after a church fire that happened in December of 2007. Now I get a picturesque view of our empty downtown lot that today only displays a few weeds that pop-up in-between the stress cracks around the empty concrete flooring, an ongoing reminder of the total loss from both our business and our residence that presided above the store with all of our precious invaluable belongings destroyed!

What remained of our store and residence, collateral damage
from the Zion Baptist Church fire.

Now, to throw gas on the provincial fire, I am a bit emotional about our beloved Olde Towne Portsmouth. I have volunteered for years to promote a lot our downtown businesses and events each and every day (not just a once in a blue moon) on sites like http://oldetowneportsmouth.com/ and our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/oldetowneportsmouthva/ and my blog http://oldetowneportsmouth.blogspot.com/ so I try hard to build up an interest in our Downtown/Olde Towne Portsmouth. Now after all, don't you think we deserve to have our business name spelled correctly? I manage to do it with all of the businesses that I represent, and if I'm not sure of the correct spelling, I do the intelligent thing and look it up. This is again,  just another element in my life that is so tiring and really completely unnecessary. Could you please Hampton Roads media quit raining on my parade? Thank you in advance!

The sky is falling chicken little is my new blog- only one previous blog was written prior to this one, but I now plan to write here more often as my "Bitch blog" of all things unbearable and tiresome! Hope your day is going better than mine, and yes they did fix our misspelled business name problem- they removed us from the article. Have a nice day!

Joe Elder

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Sometimes It's Not What We Say But What We DON'T SAY That Matters

Sometimes It's Not What We Say But What We Don't Say That Matters!

So why the chicken in the pot? Simple. Maybe chicken soup should be the menu! Okay, so I feel like that chicken in the pot. And you may ask why? I guess because I wasn't on top of my game. A customer or customers left our store with a big grudge and I was the culprit. At least that's the way that I was left to feel.

I was busy as usual wearing a dozen or so hats (as most small business owners do). I was selecting new inventory to add to our web store and Alison was engrossed paying bills on the computer. A group of three came into our showroom Skipjack Nautical Wares and from a first observation appeared not wanting to be bothered. One of the three were engrossed in conversation on his cell phone and the other two were talking between themselves. The three people, two men and one woman were black.

Now, that typically would not matter in the least, but it certainly became an issue that day with them. Moving on a few minutes into the future, I had selected a boat anchor lantern and chose to photograph it outside our riverfront store so I could use the Elizabeth River as a background. On the way out, another woman (she was white) was entering the store and I greeted her saying "hello" as she passed me by. Now, it is our store policy, or at least the way Alison and I run our store, to leave customers to shop at their leisure without a pushy salesperson nearby at their beck and call. This we believe creates a comfortable environment since so many people come in just to look around, so we leave them to do so and are available when needed. I guess some people take offense to our casual approach to how we run Skipjack as was the case with these folks. The woman that I greeted in passing was the fourth member of the group and I can only assume that the other three overheard me say hello to the "white woman" and took great offense that they were not greeted in the same manner.

The next thing that happened was the group of four left our store and one of the two men was apparently quite furious with me. He approached as I was taking pictures of the lantern screaming and accusing me of being a racial bigot! He continued to say that they were not treated like the white customers, and of course the icing on the cake was the fact that I only greeted the "white lady" and never said a thing to the rest of them. His fleeting remarks was that he planned to tell everyone he knew how we treat black customers (differently from whites) and that they will never shop at our store again. I was left speechless! I thought to myself "how did this happen and what did I do to offend these folks to have them so irate with me?" I reeled back the incident in my mind trying to figure it out. The simple answer was I did not greet them!

"Sometimes It's Not What We Say But What We Don't Say That Matters!"

Today, we still leave customers to shop at their leisure and only approach if they have a question or want to buy an item, we are now sticklers to make sure everyone is greeted at some point when they are in our store. Not that that changes anything to us, but no one, no matter who they are appreciates being treated differently when a simple "hello, how are you" would have made all the difference in the world. Lesson learned. Sometimes It's not what we say but what we don't say that matters!

Want to add to the chicken soup?