dar334

I’m not sure the reason, but I was just reminded of a time when I worked at a local department store.  This particular chain were comparable to the Meijer or WalMart of today, without groceries.  It was my first real experience with retail and I started out as a cashier.  After a few months of running a register, I was offered a job in the “Hard Lines” department.  That was my first realization that the workings inside of a department store can actually contain more than one “internal” store.  At this particular one there were two internal stores, “Hard Lines” and “Soft Lines”.

I’m the first to admit that I have always been on the naive side, naive being the lack of knowledge, wisdom, or experience, and I am the trifecta of all three of those.  The first time I recall gaining wisdom and knowledge of how having separate stores inside one store happened when we had to prepare for the upcoming week’s ad.  Not unlike the department store of today, we marked our goods with a price gun loaded with sticky labels.  (It looks like more fun than it actually is)  The prices of the sale items were labeled with bright orange tickets thus making them pop right out to the consumer.  When the “Hard Lines” employees went to the supply area for sale labels, there were only small little “leftovers” of bright orange labels available.  Now if you’ve ever had to load those labels in a gun, you know that having a nice new roll of labels generally doesn’t give the user much trouble, but having to load and use “leftover” labels can be quite unnerving.  Now again, me being the naive person I am, when I noticed all the guns being used by the “Soft Lines” girls had nice, big, new rolls of labels in them, I was shocked!  One of the girls in the “Soft Lines” area and I had become friends, so I asked her where in the heck she found the new rolls of labels.  This was where knowledge and wisdom jumped right up and slapped me the face.  In my book it was UNBELIEVABLE!  The Supervisor of the “Soft Lines” department had taken the nice new rolls of labels and hidden them.  She shared their location only with her “girls” and forced them to a vow of secrecy to that location.  This rendered the “girls” in Hardlines to struggle to get their merchandise priced for the upcoming ad.  I pretty much lost my temper and declared that we all worked for the same store, all our checks were issued by the same company and we were all working toward the same cause!  She agreed and we snuck away to the location of the labels.  Now I never found out if the Soft Lines supervisor ever realized we had located the labels she had hid, or if she assumed we had our own little stash someplace, but that is irrelevant to this ponder.

The problem of not working together as a team is still very active in today’s world and it still creams my corn.  CREAMS. MY. CORN!  When a new puppy is brought into the litter, we ALL need to look after it.  Setting it up for failure will ultimately hurt the entire litter.  That department store closed not too long after the “labels” incident.  Not that hiding price labels was the cause, but I’m confident the fact that the litter couldn’t work as a “team” played a part in it’s ultimate demise.

Now to tie this to a Biblical ponder, I will remind you of a couple of things.  We are all different parts of the same body.  The body of Christ.  The foot shouldn’t be mad at the ear because the ear isn’t used to walk around.  Nor should the ear look down on the foot because it can’t hear.  They are both working toward the success of a functioning body.  In the same sense, we aren’t suppose to work as if we are working for man, we are to work as if we are working for God.  Read the book.  It’s all black and white.

So in closing, stop putting a stumbling block in front of a new employee, or group of employees because you yourself were once “new”.  Stop being part of an epic failure.  Start working for the better, start working for God.

Ponder that.

-dar