We held our first ever, and possibly first annual, all-employee Liquor Store meeting yesterday (Sunday) in the pavilion at the Purgatory Creek Recreation Area. That’s the City’s CFO, Sue Kotchevar, in the background. Sue is is responsible for the City’s liquor store operations. Mitch Dean is the City’s Manager of Liquor Operations. Sue, Mitch and I facilitated a presentation to our liquor store employees about a major renovation of our Den Road liquor store; our new store interior design standards; new clothing and uniform requirements; the financial operations of our stores; and some recent success stories in the area of liquor law compliance tests.
Liquor store employees work Monday through Saturday, so our best option to get all of them together at one location, date and time was to do it on a Sunday. Sue, Mitch and I thought about communicating with the employees through letter or email, but the scale of the changes we are about to make in our liquor operations are large enough that we decided a face-to-face meeting was best to explain what we’re doing and why we’re doing it.
What we’re doing is taking our liquor stores up-scale. We have worked with an interior design firm on a new marketing and interior design for our stores which we believe will be more attractive and appealing to our local customer base. We’re also setting new in-house rules about the kinds of promotional stuff we’ll accept and display in the stores from our liquor, wine and beer distributors. There’s no industry with more give-away promotional marketing stuff than the liquor industry. We’ve decided that if we’re going to go up-scale and establish our own unique design, we want to keep it looking nice. We’re also setting standards for the apparel of our store employees. Nice pants. Logo shirts. No hats.
It was a good meeting and a beautiful day in the park.
Something else………..
While I was at work last Thursday, my home and cars were getting bombarded by baseball-size hail. Before Thursday, I did not believe that baseball-sized hail really existed. I’ve heard of it before, but I always thought it was just weather hype. It’s real. That’s a baseball in my son’s right hand and a chunk of hail that bounced off the hood of my wife’s car in the other. Wow! We had lots of damage, but nobody got hurt.
