i’m currently watching “fun with dick and jane”, the movie starring jim carrey and tea leoni and alec baldwin. you know, the one “based on” the scandal of enron and how all these people lost their jobs, their retirement, their pensions, the whole deal?
jim carrey does a great job of making a tragic situation comedic, but in light of recent economic happenings, i watch it in a different light than i did when the movie first came out 3 years ago. realistically, people that i know have lost their jobs. people in my church community are trying to feed a family and pay a mortgage based on whatever burger king-type job they could find.
and now, people at my company are facing the same potential fate. over at the starbucks gossip website, partners have communicated their fears on paying their bills when their store closes, because many stores that are closing do not have another one close by for them to transfer to. so the combination of the 2 just has me thinking: what the hell would i do if my husband or i ever lost our jobs? it’s happened before, but at least we still had ONE income. what would we do if we were a one income family, or if we both lost our jobs?
- sell the house or rent it out and move in with another family or into a small apartment?
- move back with the parents? (oh the horrors!)
we already own both of our old, beater cars. and we’re thrifty people, so unlike dick and jane, we don’t have much we could sell. we live a frugal life as it is. we’ve read through dave ramsey’s book “total money makeover“, which we both would highly recommend. it makes me feel like perhaps i’m less scared than i could be, but then again, we’ve never been in that boat, and i can hardly imagine how difficult it really is! hopefully, unlike dick and jane, we would have friends and a community to turn to to help us out.
anyone experience this hardship before? what do you do? who do you turn to?
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i will now make a confession that most of you as my readers will not know. i work at a fortune 500 company that sells coffee-type beverages and just recently announced that they were closing 600 locations.
you may or may not know that i’m a believer in God but have had my share of frustrations with church. when i first joined this company it’s because i saw a company who was doing things that the church wasn’t even doing: taking care of people, investing in employees as well as farmers on the other side of the globe, running on a system of integrity beyond what i had ever seen or heard in any company. my experience when i began working was the same. i found more acceptance and love from fellow partners than i had felt at most churches i’ve been a part of.
we’re quite the hodge-podge of diversity in this regard. i’ve met several other church-goers who work there, as well as people of all sorts of alternative lifestyles, working the floor together and creating an experience for each other and customers simultaneously.
something changed about a year ago. i can’t put my finger on it, but the “feel” that i had come to the company for started to disappear. a year later, my team and i feel like we are overworked, underappreciated (moreso by upper management), and like we don’t know how to do our job anymore. labor has been cut, expectations raised, duties increased, but we’re still making the same rate we were a year ago when things were more fun and had more heart.
i understand that in the light of this economy that “drastic times call for drastic measures”. i posted earlier about how we’re trying to adjust life for the cost of gas. our customers who have known us forever are doing the same thing. so while i understand the reasoning behind the recent decision to close 600 stores, my heart hurts for these partners who, whether i have met them or not, i feel connected to in a special way. i’m fortunate to be in the 93% of safe stores, but i no longer feel safe, warm, loved on, and accepted. it could have just as easily been MY store, MY partners, MY home away from home, MY livelihood. and a couple weeks’ severance wouldn’t exactly pay the rent.
so remember, the next time you walk into your favorite “third place” and see those baristas who are an extension of your family, that deep down, they may just ache for the partners losing their stores, even if they’re not nearby. even with the loss of a “feel” over the past year, i will still say that starbucks partners have an innate way of creating a family within their stores, and caring deeply about other people.
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