“We mourn for places and eras just as much as we do for people.” A journey through the five stages of grief in response to losing a home away from home where cherished community was found…
by: Catherine Mainland
On Christmas Day, 2023, I made a pilgrimage to a store where I had worked part-time from 2018 until it closed earlier that year. Another company has since bought its intellectual property, so I won’t name names, but you may have shopped there if you needed bedding, towels, and such. My motives for working there were twofold:
1) Like actors serving food in LA, teachers need a second job to fund their frivolous teaching habit.
2) The strip mall was exactly 2.5 miles from my home, so I applied to every business within it that was hiring. By sheer chance, this one was the first to arrange an interview, and I was assigned to the health and beauty department, rather than home goods. I had no idea I’d grow to love the place so much or feel so sad when I went back to visit.
It was a typical winter day in North Carolina — 65° and sunny. I sat in the parking lot and wrote down my memories. It would have been the perfect scene for a poet. The crows I used to watch before an opening shift were hopping through the empty parking spaces. A solitary shopping cart, left behind when the liquidators moved out, nosed hopefully at the wall of a neighboring store. Some signage was still above the doors. Peering through the glass, I saw multiple floor plans piling on top of each other. I was there during two full remodels and could remember every detail of each one. We mourn for places and eras just as much as we do for people.
Just as it’s unwise to turn the dead into saints, I won’t pretend it was all sunshine and roses at that job. Customers aren’t always nice people. We used to have excess products behind decorative banners above the shelves, and shoppers tended to ask the most inane questions while we were sweating at the top of a ladder, holding the banner out of the way with our face while balancing baskets of merchandise on both shoulders. Corporations can also be a bit, well, corporate. I didn’t take to the script they posted next to the cash registers for us to read at one point. Accepting the challenge wholeheartedly, I’d proclaim to each customer, “They’ve stuck up a script for me to read to you! Are you ready?! Let’s go!” I’m guessing the managers stopped putting me on the registers after hearing that, which was a win. Otherwise, my shins were perpetually bruised from the stepladders, and any job that has you walking around on hard floors gets tiring after you’re 40. Wearing an apron also invited customers to share their medical problems, often including some delightful show-and-tell. I actually got to use the joke we throw around in academia: “I’m not that kind of doctor, please don’t show me your rash.” And I did have to have a talk with my ego whenever my students saw me in my apron, or on the memorable day when a future administrator from my university gave me that “where do I know you from?” look until I reminded her and asked what I could help her find. At least it wasn’t laxatives. Or lube.
It’s the people that make or break a job. Research has proven that any group effort goes better with diverse group members, and my three ladies and I were a dream team, each with our own superpower. I loved checking expiration dates. S was a whiz at designing entire displays for new merchandise. A was the queen of emptying the stockroom onto the shelves. D kept everything looking beautiful. Our ages span four decades. We come from three countries on two continents, two races, four religious backgrounds, and vastly different life experiences, but none of that matters. Working together toward a common goal shows you who people really are — their actual qualities, like consideration, and reliability. Our department ran like a well-oiled machine, not least because the rest of the employees stayed out of it; they knew we’d have their hide if one trial-size bottle of eye drops ended up in the wrong place. The managers never had to check what we were up to, either. They knew we’d always leave the place ship-shape, because a friend would be the next person to work there. That is why we experienced all the stages of grief as the store ground ponderously to a close: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and acceptance.
Denial
Denial was easy, especially as we had been through those two remodels and multiple changes of direction during the previous five years. So when rumors started, we brushed them off with a joke. It was a huge company with a bizarrely devoted fan base. Pop culture references to it abounded. This was the place where we all used to come in for Monday evening freight deliveries and descend on the pallets of boxes like locusts, pausing in our mission to put everything in its home only to have impromptu dance parties or come up with new ways not to swear in front of customers. One young woman had a real knack for that. “Motherfather,” she’d exclaim, “the shelf’s all kerfuffled!” It was too ridiculous to think that it wouldn’t last forever.
Bargaining
Denial morphed quickly into bargaining. Sales reports started turning up at the registers and desks for us to pore over in between customers (which, to be honest, was an increasing amount of the time). Ok, so maybe some locations would have to be trimmed down, but if we could just match last year’s sales for the quarter, or, if nothing else, beat the other stores in the area, we’d surely be alright. When people from the district office came to do a walkthrough, we analyzed every single second of their time there, down to estimated respiration rates and close readings of all their rhetorical choices. Otherwise, we became forecasters of sales and payroll. If we got this many pallets of freight, it clearly meant we were staying open. If they cut that many hours, it obviously meant we were proving our efficiency. If the manager didn’t come down onto the sales floor after his weekly call with head office, it was a good sign, or a bad sign, or he was working on his resumé. This wasn’t a fun stage.
Anger
Fortunately, we had anger to look forward to, and it lasted through the rest of the experience. At first, we had to keep it under wraps. If we weren’t actually closing, we might regret ripping the customers who made the cashier who’d worked there for almost twenty years cry a new one. I bit my tongue when a middle-aged man came in with the financial pages of the Sunday paper pressed between his side and elbow to quiz me about what was happening (what I should have said was “gosh, I don’t know, my secretary didn’t bring me any details with my coffee before I put my apron on this morning”). But as it became clear that we were on the skids, we just leaned into the rage, and as corporate weren’t there, we directed it toward the customers. S was more gracious than many of us. When irate customers complained about useless coupons or items no longer being in stock, she’d kindly remind them we were losing our jobs and wait patiently for the flustered apology they’d eventually manage to come up with. I went with more of a shaming approach at first, meeting any questions with something like, “thank you so much for your concern, my colleagues and I are very worried about losing our jobs” — all delivered in a steely deadpan while I stared straight into their eyes and watched them try and rearrange their faces to make it look as if they weren’t just misery vultures. That got a bit exhausting, though, so some of us started to have some fun with it.
Customer: When are you guys closing?
Me: We close at 8pm! [spin on toe, flounce off, ponytail swinging]
Or…
Customer: Where has the makeup section gone?
Me: We got rid of that over two years ago, ma’am!
Customer: Oh. This is all rather sad.
Me: You’ll be fine! [spin on toe, flounce off, ponytail swinging]
Once the liquidation-proper began and all company coupons were void, I got to witness this glorious exchange:
Customer: The discount is only 10%. But the coupons used to be 20%.
Employee: Yeah. [beat] Bummer.
My colleague didn’t spin or flounce. She just waited for the customer to walk away.
Depression
What made many of us so angry was that cavalier, selfish attitude of the customers. This wasn’t just a place for us to work at and for them to get all their knickknacks and doohickies. This was our home away from home. Everyone signed everyone else’s birthday and condolence cards in the break room. When S suffered a loss in her family, I couldn’t understand why she was coming to work, but when I lost my Dad later that year, it was just about the only place I could bear to be. The manager got it, and I will be eternally grateful to him for allocating hours for grief counselling. He let me clock in whenever I needed to, so I could force the time to pass, armed with printouts and rolls of labels. Setting the shelves and then hunting for the correct items in the stockroom was exactly the kind of emotional white noise I needed to get through those first weeks. It was our safe space and our social venue and our place to put in an honest day’s work then leave it all behind when we clocked out. For all the annoyances, the towel lint that covered us from head to toe, the leaks in the roof and cleaning, the toilets that the awful customers had done unspeakable things to, it was still nothing short of depressing to think of it all coming to an end.
Acceptance
After a while, you just have to face the facts. Everyone who needed to jump ship did, and the rest of us stuck around for a variety of reasons, including morbid curiosity and a lack of motivation to find a replacement. My evening shifts ran from 4pm to 8pm, and there were weeks in which I could have identified which few items had sold since the last time I was there, as so little had changed between the days. I started closing the department for the night as soon as I got there, in a quixotic attempt to do the very best work I could while it lasted. We faked out entire shelves to make them look full, emptying the bottom shelf from each section to pretend the minimalism was intentional. I took extra time to eat snacks from my apron pocket while watching the compactor crush boxes, just to make sure it was done properly, and there were several evenings when we all sat around in the patio furniture at the front of the store, watching the sunset. The vast parking lot afforded us one of the few opportunities to actually see the sky in Raleigh. Sometimes, a customer or two would walk in and give us a bemused smile as we informed them they’d know where to find us if they needed anything. I liked those shifts.
When the news we were closing finally broke, before opening on a Sunday morning, the keyholder and I were the only people there. My husband texted me a link, and I remember my colleague’s hands shaking as he scanned the website. From that point, the freefall began. We switched from filling gaps to consolidating as much as possible, so the liquidators could empty their warehouse into the space. The tasks went from quixotic to Sisyphean, and it started feeling like a rolling barrage. We’d get a section shrunk down and moved closer to the front of the store, so the random fitness equipment and baby gear and multipacks of underwear could fill those shelves that used to be so beautifully organized and full of shampoo, then consolidate those the next day and move them forward too.
The customers also went more feral as the discounts deepened. It was like an anthropological immersion project. Merchandise would be all over the floor. All over the damned floor. Mixing bowls were in the toothpaste, toothpaste was in the cutting boards, cutting boards were in the soap dishes, like some kind of demented scavenger hunt. We could tell how each employee was feeling that day based on whether they chose a tiny segment of the universe to fix or simply walked away. As we created space in the stockroom, there was a shelf at just the right height to sit on, and I’ll admit to taking extended breaks in there and playing chess on my phone, just to get away from people.
Eventually, other merchants came to buy the shelves and ladders and fixtures for their own stores, and that was it. I spent my last hour there sweeping the empty sections with a huge broom, just leaning on the handle and letting gravity do the work as I walked slowly up and down.
RIP
Enough time has now passed that I’ve used up all my store-brand products. Throwing each empty box or bottle away felt like saying goodbye again. I didn’t bother replacing the job, and I’ve now got over the urge to straighten other stores (unless the employees are nice, in which case we should all chip in). And my ladies and I still meet up and check in regularly; the excuse to schedule another dinner and drinks is a good part of my motivation for finishing this essay, to be perfectly honest. Each time, we marvel at how lucky we were to meet at all. Where else could this community possibly have formed?
The store is still empty, years after that Christmas pilgrimage. As you can tell, it’s taken me a while to unpack what I want to make of the whole experience. The building looks shabbier and dustier than it should, but maybe it was always like that. Either way, it’s not just the store that’s empty. There’s a gap there, waiting to be filled. Where are teachers supposed to get side gigs now? Where are teenagers supposed to get their first encounter with the real world of work? Where are old and lonely souls meant to go to have a pleasant conversation? There’s been a quiet sea change in society as everything has moved online. The world as we knew it has gone, and it deserves a moment of silence.
