workaday Wednesday

The first time I was in a meeting with the (at the time) sales director for my current employer, he told a story.

His mother, he said, had once gone into a GNC store ten minutes before closing, and asked for something to help with her arthritis pain. She went home with some topical cream, and called her son because she was still confused about the array of options available.

It’s a story that doesn’t seem too unusual. Supplements are confusing; retail store employees aren’t trained medical professionals; arthritis is a medical condition that requires a delicate dance to talk about at all in a supplement aisle; ten minutes isn’t nearly long enough to cover every product and its potential benefits and side effects and contraindications with prescription meds, and that’s all before you take into account a million other things about how retail stores operate.

But the story ends like this. The sales director called the store the next day and got the employee fired.

It still makes me want to cry and rage, years after hearing it. I am still not sure whether he truly believed the story made him seem like a laudable human being, or if it was told merely to frighten us.

But I think of that story often.

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