Anyone need some red polos?

August 18, 2012

I have some news.  I have kept this news from you for a couple days in order to not jinx it.  I have a new job. 

I am going to be a store manager for CVS/Caremark.  Here is how it all happened.

While I was on vacation-one I decided to stay in Cincinnati for instead of leaving town-I received a phone call from a recruiter.  For those of you not in retail for the past 25 years, this sort of thing used to happen all the time.  Retail chains would expand into a new area or experience some growth in a particular region and start making cold calls to existing retail managers in that town.  The premise would always be that they were just asking if you knew anyone who may have just left your organization or something like that, but the reality was that they were asking you if you were interested.  Retailers have not been recruiting much in that manner over the past 10 years since growth is not as common and there are plenty of candidates coming fresh from college.

Fresh from college has been Target's approach the past 5 years or so evidenced by my peers.  In my store I have worked with approximately 20 young men and women who have been between the ages of 22 and 25.  I have been the father to these children over these years though I think some of them would have referred to me more as a weird uncle.  To be clear, I am not the weird uncle who ends up with his trunks floating in the family pool, but more the uncle who is always talking about his war stories from Viet Nam kind of uncle.  Of these 20 young people, only about 5 are still with Target.  Young people have more options than old people.  Working at The Target is tough.

So as you may remember, I was recently turned down for a promotion.  I have also recently had a second knee injury.  Those two things have lodged into my brain as signs that I need to look at the next 10 years and see how Target plays into my plans.  10 years is just an arbitrary number since I just had my 10 year anniversary of working at Target.  Anyway, I have wondered how many years these knees have left in them doing this sort of work.  10 more holiday seasons, 10 more inventories, 10 more back to school seasons, 10 more years of guests losing their carts or not being able to find twine at The Target. 

The direction this was leading me in was retirment.  No, not anythime soon, but how soon could we have enough money together for me to retire from managing at Target and do something less abusive on my person.  That meant staying at Target until CJ was done with college and then stepping away.

THEN, a dude named Barrett was calling me on the phone and telling me he had found a resume of mine from 11 years ago from Monster.com or one of those job search web sites.  It was so old it did not have Target as a previous employer and I had an AOL email address.  When was the last time you heard, "You've Got Mail!"  Unless of course you were watching Tom Hanks court Meg Ryan in the "old" movie, You've Got Mail.  I had to look that up.

So Barrett and I chatted (while I pictured him in a tweed jacket)  (and pants you perv) and he told me about CVS and asked if I wanted to interview.  Why not.  I had two phone interviews and an in person interview with a district manager who LOVED me.  During each of these interviews they tried to scare me about the hard work that being a manger at CVS entailed because it was so hands on.  Really?  Have you met me?  Oh, I guess not.

So, while this is scary and a cut in pay for a couple years, it seems more me.  I am searching for happiness and a new challenge.  I hope I have found both.  There is a 12 week training program during which I will be working 40 hours per week.  My income will be supplemented by the 125 hours of vacation time Target still owes me.  I will see my family at Christmas.  Weird.  I really hope to start blogging about great new things for my new work life.  We will see.

This is all dependant on passing my drug test though.  Does excessive caffeine show up on a drug test?  God, I hope not.

Yesterday 3 big wigs from Target called me or stopped in to see me to try to convince me to stay.  They would push through my promotion, transfer me to another store, buy me some artificial knees, whatever it took.  Too late.  Why do we always wait to see the value of good, steady, dependable people until it is too late.  I am guilty myself.  Something to learn and grow from for all of us.

My last day is August 31st and I start anew on September 10th.  Ready or not life, here I come.