Category: Life in Alaska

Last year on this day, I wrote the check that made my purchase of the gift store a fact. It also happened to be my birthday. So today, one year on, on my 59th birthday, I take a moment to reflect on this decision to buy the gift store.

Overall, I have a lot of “buyer’s remorse.” I think it was unwise for me to take on this challenge. I won’t say that I’m failing – I think that actually, I’m doing pretty well. I’m keeping the business above water financially, and running a going concern. I’ve even think that I’ve been successful at restoring some of the community trust in the store as longstanding local institution, that had been a bit eroded by the previous owner’s efforts to gentrify the store – gentrification really isn’t something Craig, Alaska, is ready for.

No, I’m not failing at running the store. But I derive almost zero sense of personal accomplishment or satisfaction. It’s only a source of constant stress and neverending miniature crises that each has to be resolved. Being the manager means I’m the person who ultimately always has to say “no” and “I’m sorry” to each and every unhappy stakeholder (customer, employee, vendor, service provider). This is not a role I enjoy in the least. And unlike with teaching, I don’t feel a sufficient sense of reward in the occasional positive feedback to counterbalance that burden. This is difficult for me to parse – I think I am simply more capable of accepting negativity from children, and also somehow more capable of enjoying limited positive responses. With adults (and especially, elderly adults) I have less patience for shortcomings, frankly. I expect old people (which is at least half the gift store’s customer base) to be more considerate, or something. But it doesn’t really work that way, does it? Perhaps it has to do with my own stage of life, as caretaker for a cantankerous elderly adult. I don’t know.

All I know is that I’m mostly miserable with the day-to-day burden of the store, and I resent that it’s become a more-than-full-time job that robs me of my formerly enjoyable time at my various hobbies – my writing, my geofiction, my eccentric “follies” (e.g. the treehouse).

So happy birthday to me. Buying the store currently ranks in the “Top 5” of “Mistakes I’ve Made In My Life.” Disentangling myself, however… I accept it’s a long-term commitment, and even if buying the store was a mistake, I would be compounding the mistake to try to bail ungracefully. So. I’ll cope.

Over the years, but mostly many years ago when I was younger, I used to enjoy the genre of computer game known as “simulation games”. The king of these games, in my opinion, is the SimCity series – I have enjoyed all of them, from way back in the early 90’s. Also, there’s SimCity’s knockoff, the Cities: Skylines games. There are many other entries in the genre, though. I’ve enjoyed Civilization, of course, and all sorts of minor titles like SimTower, SimEarth, Railroad Tycoon, Capitalism, Shopping Center Tycoon, Theme Park, and many others. The genre, and my experience with it, goes back even further than the PC era, though. I remember playing a game which I know now was called “The Sumerian Game” while tagging along with Arthur up to the computer lab at Humboldt State in the early 1970’s. Arthur was a student at Humboldt, and I was a 7 or 8 year old kid but I spent many hours on the pre-PC mainframe (more likely a “minicomputer” but still a bunch of networked green-screen terminals) playing that Sumerian Game, pretending to be a Sumerian King who had problems with starving peasants and such things, alongside teaching myself BASIC.

All of which is to say, I have long history playing these types of simulation games.

Well, recently, I seem to have started a new game. Without going into too much detail, I was made an offer I found difficult to refuse, and I bought the gift store where I’ve been working for the last 3 1/2 years. This only happened about 3 weeks ago, and the transfer of ownership was last weekend, on the first of the month. The whole thing happened very fast because the previous owners, my former bosses, ended up confronting major life changes and moved back to Michigan somewhat unexpectedly, and were seeking of offload their business commitment here in Alaska.

It’s been a huge amount of work, getting things set up. Setting up accounts, vendors, payroll, making sure all the paperwork is in order. I already more or less know the business – the “customer-facing” side of the business doesn’t feel challenging or overwhelming to me. But the “back end” is hard, and I’m not very good at bureaucracy or paperwork anyway. But as I sit navigating spreadsheets and lists of vendors and charts of accounts in a bookkeeping application, I can’t help but feel I’ve started playing a new type of simulation game – just one with quite real-world consequences, because it’s with real money.

I’ll try to give more updates as things progress, but right now I’m mostly “heads down” and working about 3x more than before trying to get the whole thing working. I’m grateful to my coworker Jan, who knows the business even better than I do and who has stuck around as a continuing employee, and to Arthur, who gave me a “family loan” (against my well-funded but illiquid IRA account) to make it happen.