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Posted on 12/23/2018 1:06:25 PM PST by Pontiac
One evening when the son was growing up, the telephone in their home rang. The caller, with nervousness in his voice, asked for Robert Lazarus, who came to the phone.
The man, almost apologetically, said he and his wife had purchased a tea set at Lazarus. They had never owned one before, but saw it on display and decided it was something they would like to have in their home.
Robert Lazarus waited to hear what was coming next. Was there a flaw? Was a cup or saucer broken?
That wasn’t it. The man said he and his wife did not know the proper way to serve tea—how to make use of the tea set when company came over. They sensed there was an etiquette to it, but no one had ever told them what it was.
Some of Lazarus’s customers had very modest incomes; to them, that downtown store was almost a palace, a place of aspiration, even if they were only looking. The tea set had represented a step up, a significant expenditure for this man and his wife. And they weren’t quite sure how it was intended to be used.
So the husband called the man whose name was on the store—at home, at night—for advice.
Robert Lazarus, his son said, stayed on the phone with his customer and, with great care, walked him through the steps of having a tea party, of using an elegant tea set. He told the man stories about tea receptions he and his own wife had given; he answered every question.
I asked the son—by then an elderly man himself—if his dad had seemed at all bothered...
“Bothered?” the son said. “He couldn’t have been more pleased. He talked about it with great fondness for the rest of the night
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
If the entire text is in the HTML of the paywalled article it will be extracted.
It works on a lot of paywalled articles. Not all, but many.
Sorry to hear that Obama forced you in to retirement.
Also sorry that your customers lost a source for good products and service.
Those things are hard to come by these days.
I am fortunate to live in an area with quite a few good nurseries. A couple give the kind of service you describe.
But the competition here in that field is fierce.
On five mile stretch of road here there are at least that many nurseries.
There was a time in our country when our ‘elites’ were really elite ...kike the man in this piece.
Now our so-called ‘elites’ look down on most citizens and they’re as phony and tacky as a three dollar bill...
Reminds me of the maps of IKEA stores with the semi-secret "by-passes" if you're in a hurry.
Something else to consider:
We often see people today who work at a Burger King, and they say they can't support their family or buy a house on the wages at Burger King. And, of course, they want $15 an hour to work at Burger King. And we, of course, say that it's an entry level job, and you shouldn't work their your whole life, and of course you can't buy a house while working at Burger King.
But how different is it being a clerk at a Hardware Store? Or a Radio Shack? People in those jobs used to know everything about all the things they sold. People could work at those jobs for decades and really learn everything there was to know. You could build a life while working down at the hardware store.
But today? How much do you make at the hardware store today? Can you buy a house with such wages? I doubt it.
We took a wrong turn somewhere. Simple jobs can deliver tremendous value to the local community. But there's no good reason for an employee to stick around to the point where they can really deliver such value. It's not worth it to the worker -- they have better places to be. And the local community loses out.
My friend who owned one inherited it from his dad and build it up such that it was a great local asset for keeping the community glued together and always moving toward a state of good repair).
My friend (saw him this afternoon with his wife) and his dad were both brilliant at meeting the hardware needs of this community. They had a vast knowledge which they made available to the community.
G. Fox was like that...matter of fact, there was a fire and most of the records were lost...most people paid what they owed. G. Fox was like that until Mrs Auerbach (G. Fox daughter) sold to May Department Stores in 1968.
Publix is a great store...
Stew Leonard’s is a store I miss. The Newington store is in an old Caldor that I worked in. Personal service might be lost to most, but still there are stores that still believe in it.
I usually find the opposite.
The advantage of shopping at Best Buy is that the salesperson will sell me what I want, not the most expensive or the one where they have the highest daily or weekly spiff.
All the large nurseries here, either went bankrupt, saw the writing on the wall and got out, or liquidated and retired.
The small, operate out of a pole bldg on their existing property, landscapers survived all the new usury taxes on plant material, climbing insurance premiums, and higher operating costs. My 50-60 vendor nurseries all over the US, did the same thing: went out of business.
My West Coast (Oregon) supplier of 1,300 Jap Maples died, and his son & daughter sold the 1,200ac property to a developer, who promptly bulldozed 1,000 specimen Jap Maples - larger collection even than mine - and built a massive housing development.
My rare, unusual, and hard-to-find conifer supplier, also in Oregon, was sold and resold 3x, and had to sell-off 100 of 200ac, just to pay new usury taxes on leftover inventory, and try to survive.
Small businesses mostly survived.
It was a sad year for the rest of us.
I wish I had that option. Where I live, Home Depot is 2 blocks away. The nearest independent is 15 miles. The products of the company I work for are sold at both. I’d rather support the independent but can’t drive that far.
Employee-owned...
Sometimes you have no choice. I’m somewhat handy, but most times when I go into the hardware store I have questions and the local shop almost always has an answer for me....the big-box stores, not so much.
They move stuff around occasionally where I shop. Usually it only takes one trip to figure it out, since I buy the same few items over and over. But for something new, they have a website that has all stocked items on it, and what aisle they’re located in, so I check there first.
Your daughter’s not from Durham, NC, is she? Because that is word-for-word what was going on with the kids’ manager at my local B&N when I lived there. Hated seeing someone so talented getting so frequently stomped by management.
At the other extreme, there is Aldi. Small, but high quality and excellent selection if you have the smallest trace of cooking ability. And mine put all the stock back in the exact same place after they remodeled. :)
Bump
I think your quoted text is from another unrelated thread.
Hit WalMart yesterday for a variety of goods, one of them an impulse buy of a bulky box set of pots and pans.
We had taken one of the smaller carts as “we weren’t going to buy much”. The damn thing ended up loaded to the gills, with the big box perched precariously on the front.
As we were going out, one of the employees (Tammy) offered to carry it out. We demurred, but she grabbed another empty cart and said “Lead the way, I’m on my break anyway.”
Well, we get out to the lot and damned if we can remember where we parked the car. (Yet another Senior Moment). She said “If you have Smart Keys, give it to me and I’ll walk up and down the lanes, pressing the horn icon until we find it.”
Fifteen minutes later we do, one lane over and facing a direction distinctly different from what I “remembered”. I apologized for wasting her break time, but she blew it off as “It happens to me too.”
Something you don’t expect nowadays. (I wrote the manager about it).
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