Final Draft of Piece #2

I just realized that my final draft of this piece never got posted, so here it is.



A clump of bicycles is parked on the sidewalk alongside of the building, and the smell of cigarette smoke drifts past. The sign above the door states “Polar Pops, Any Size, 59 cents, Every Day!” At the top of the building is a bright red “K” sign, denoting the building as a Circle K convenience store, although many that frequent the store know by its former name, Dairy Mart.
A grandfatherly old man enters, and is greeted by a smiling “here comes trouble!” from the cashier. He chuckles and steps to the counter to buy lottery tickets, jokingly looking over his shoulder to see whom she might have been referring to.
Behind the man, the line snakes past a cooler of sandwiches, a shelf of snickers bars, and a display of cheap jewelry. College students holding gallons of milk or six-packs of beer wait in line with businessmen stopping for a pack of cigarettes, and mothers and children stopping by for a snack on the way home from school stand alongside men who ride up on bikes to buy a bottle of beer concealed in a paper bag; this convenience store attracts people from all walks of life.
Located at the corner of Lovell and Oakland streets, not far from downtown Kalamazoo, this Circle K store sees a wide variety of customers each day. Stocking everything from Red Bull to eggs, and frozen pizzas to WD-40, and open 24 hours a day, the store generally has whatever someone could possibly want at the moment.
Just down the street from Kalamazoo College and around the corner from Western Michigan University, a large number of the store’s customers are college students. “I like working with the students” says Teri, the store’s manager. “They’re all nice.”
In addition to students, the store serves a wide variety of customers, including families, college students, and the homeless residents of the area, and therefore the employees have witnessed many hilarious scenarios. “Lots of funny stuff happens around here,” Teri says, laughing as she thinks back over the experiences she has had while working at this particular Circle K store. “There have been drunks lying on a customer’s car, and the customer has comes in to say “can you get them off my car?”’
She continues. “Also, there’s one elderly man who lives in the area…well one day he was standing by the counter, and we looked and his pants were at his ankles. Then he said, “Could you help me pull my pants up?” And whoever was working at the time just went around the counter and helped him like it was no big deal.”
Because of the large and varied customer pool, employees make a concerted effort to make sure all the interactions go smoothly and every customer feels comfortable shopping there. There have been instances where potential customers have entered the store drunk, or approach other customers in search of money, but as Teri says, “We won’t allow it. We deter it, we stop it. I mean, being a woman, if I saw that kind of thing going on, I’d be going to the next store instead.”
In fact, there is another convenience store located just a block away, Munchie Mart. The two businesses stock many of the same products, and pull from the same customer pool, but Teri says that Circle K doesn’t do anything extra to try to gain an edge. “I don’t know if it’s actually a competition, but Circle K is corporate owned, so it’s one of Circle K’s things that whether you’re in Mexico, Canada, or Ohio, you can walk into Circle K and know what to expect. So all of us carry the exact same things, they tell us what to carry.”
The atmosphere is an important factor that brings customers into the store, and turns customers into regulars. “We’ve painted, we’ve cleaned…makes it look better, smell cleaner” Teri says, pausing to laugh. “People wanna come back; we’re friendlier.” “Most of the customers, the kids know exactly what they smoke, exactly what they want, and a lot of them know the birthdays, you know, cause we card everybody.”
Although the employees work hard to make the store run smoothly, there are some customers that take advantage of the easy-going atmosphere and attempt to steal merchandise. “It’s always beer”, Teri says, shaking her head and smiling wryly. “We have some kids that try to steal candy, but I would say 80% of thefts are beer.”
However, she continues, “I would that we catch about 70% of them.” Luckily, this sort of incident is the worst the employees have been forced to deal with; when asked if the store has ever been held up for cash, she smiles and says, “we have never had that. We’re lucky.”
Another way in which the store has been lucky is the positive largely positive reactions to their customers to the new state smoking laws. Until the recent changes, customers would often stand on the sidewalk smoking next the ice freezer, but the smokers have now been relegated to around the corner of the store beside towering stacks of colorful milk crates. While this is an inconvenience for smokers, Circle K still sells a large volume of cigarettes, and the new laws have had positive affects on other areas of the store’s business. “I think that our sales of beer have went up”, Teri says. “People are drinking at home because they can smoke at home.“
The store also used to sell gas from a cluster of pumps in the parking lot, but last summer it was a corporate Circle K decision to remove the pumps for economic and environmental reasons. “The tanks in the ground were not environmentally friendly anymore, and with what gas we sold, it was too costly to try to put them back in” Teri explains. “But since they took the gas pumps out and we have better parking, my sales have almost doubled.”
As the manager, Teri has control over many aspects of how the store is run, and she also cultivates friendships with customers and maintains a motherly relationship with her employees. “I’ve been at this store for about a year and a half, and I would be really saddened to leave. The customer base and all my kids that work for me.” Smiling, she continues. “You know, it’s just the whole concept of everything. Everybody, like I said, from the homeless to the families to the kids, and everybody’s really great. You know, there are a few sour apples, but everybody’s really great. I’ve met a lot of neat people.
“It’s fun working here, it is. To me it doesn’t seem like a job. I don’t wake up in the morning and go “Ugh, I gotta go to work”, I really do enjoy it here.”