CSotD: The chains of command you forge in life
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Marla is a gem, but today's Retail is a reminder of how well working in the mall helps young people understand the world of employment.
The relationship between the mall office and individual tenants can occasionally be fraught. The real relationship, of course, is between the mall ownership and the store ownership, neither of whom are anywhere near the scene. Which puts the mall office in the role of tattletale and nag and individual tenants in the position, usually, of the kid who raises a hand two minutes before the bell and reminds the teacher that she forgot to assign any homework.
Or, in this case, reminds Teacher to ticket the employees cars for parking in the wrong place. And, in the absence of a whole lot of Marlas, it puts the employees, as usual, at the bottom of the food chain, with the choice of parking out in the section of the lot marked "Late Night Muggings" or walking out at the end of a shift and finding your car gone and having to pay to get it back.
"Retail" creator Norm Feuti's book, "Pretending You Care," lays out the realities of life at the mall better than I ever could. I gave my son, a former mall rat, a copy, and he said he appreciated the truth of the whole thing but found it a painful read for just that reason, and the reviews in that link are as worth reading as the book itself.
My own knowledge of that world comes from my days as a business reporter. I once wrote a brief story about what stores were coming and going at our local mall and included in the list "the redundantly named 'Corndog On A Stick'" after which I got an aggrieved call from the mall office over having made fun of a new tenant. I asked her if she'd ever seen a corndog that wasn't on a stick and she said that wasn't the point.
Talk about being stuck in the middle. Imagine a job that includes calling up the newspaper to defend the name "Corndog On A Stick."
Not so funny a year or two later when someone slipped me a set of blueprints for a major expansion of the mall that was to include a new grocery chain and a large office supply store as anchors. I was able to confirm those tenants, but couldn't get a comment from the mall ownership or the mall management.
Finally, I got the mall manager on the phone and said, "Look, I'm sitting here with the blueprints in front of me" and he said, "Well, it's all very preliminary," and I wrote something in the story along the lines of "Mall Manager Joe Btfsplk declined to comment, saying only that any plans were 'very preliminary.'"
Joe Btfsplk was fired the next day.
I was assured by others there that Joe was already on shaky ground and I shouldn't feel bad about it, but I've kind of thought of him when I contemplate the character of Stuart, the store manager in "Retail."
A few years after that, I had apparently earned enough stripes to be taken into mall ownership's confidence, and their rental agent became my New Best Buddy. He fed me an innocuous tip or two that could become briefs or simply background, and he told me one story that I think was true, illustrating how tenuous these things are.
There was a warehouse company — BJs or Costco, I don't remember — with plans to go into a new building, and one of the brass was coming into town. The rental agent met him at the tiny three-gate airport (this was pre-9/11) and, as they stood there, the fellow asked, "Is it true that they're building a Sam's here?"
The rental agent said yes and the guy walked back to the corporate jet and flew away. End of deal.
I had already learned by then that what I didn't write about was as important as what I did. I had a very unspoken understanding with sources that I wouldn't withhold important news from our readers, but that I'd listen to them if there were elements that they needed to keep close to the vest for a limited time. And that, as long as they didn't lie to me, we'd try not to hurt each other.
And sometimes, it was good to throw a little bomb out there to make the point. When Wal-Mart was first coming to town, the editor walked over to my desk one day with a fat envelope of anti-Wal-Mart clippings that bore no return address. "Take a look at this and tell me what you think," he said.
It was real poison-pen stuff, and, while I'm certainly no fan of Wal-Mart, I'm no fan of that kind of anonymous back-stabbing. Tell me who you are and we'll talk about keeping your name out of it, but don't expect me to just publish your screeds uncritically. As another fellow named Michael once cautioned, it's not nice to insult my intelligence.
They had sent it through a postage meter and, in those days before public information became a year-long slog through federal bureaucracy, it took about 10 minutes to walk across the street to the Post Office and have them look up the number of the meter.
The next day, there was a small story in the paper about how awful Wal-Mart was, based on materials sent from the postage meter at a Hills Department Store warehouse in Ohio. The story also had extremely embarrassed quotes from Hills corporate headquarters and somewhat amused quotes from Bentonville, Arkansas.
boom.
The one I still think about, though, came towards the end of my time on the business desk.
My little buddy, the rental agent, called with a tip about the new strip mall being built up at the Canadian border. It seems they had not filed an adequate SEQR permit application and were being sued by a little old widow lady whose land adjoined theirs and whose well was endangered by the construction.
Not only did he know about the lawsuit, but he had managed to get his hands on the actual papers. If I'd keep his name out of it, he'd fax them to me. Was I interested?
Why, yes, I was. Little old widow lady suing developers? The newsroom was starting to smell like journalism awards already!
So I got the materials and pored through 25 pages or so of legalese and bafflegab and, yes, this poor little old widow lady was, indeed, suing to protect her drinking water from the evil developer.
But it bothered me that, instead of using one of our local attorneys, this little old widow lady was using a law firm located a couple of hundred miles away, in the same city, as it happens, as the ownership of the mall of which my tipster was a rental agent.
"Good afternoon, Dewey, Cheatham and Howe. How may I help you?"
"I'd like to talk to the attorney who works on the MegaMall Company account."
"Oh, we do so much work with them, I'd have to have more information."
First question I had for myself was, "Is this a story, or are you just pissed because he insulted your intelligence?"
Second question was, "Is this worth blowing him up over? Or do you want to keep him as a tipster until he leads you into something that matters more than a bogus nuisance lawsuit?"
I decided to wait and see if the lawsuit actually made any waves before I burned the source, and it never did, but I left the business desk a few months later anyway.
Which, incredbile as this might seem, brings us back to Marla and the license numbers, because she knows she's leaving Grumbels in a few months anyway.
Tossing a spanner or two into the works is not a bad way to go out, given how much you really matter to them in the long run and even in the short one.
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