Category: Working at the Gift Shop

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.

Yesterday at work, I got an email notification announcing the delivery of a package to the store (as one does). The thing is, no package had been delivered, and one wasn’t delivered later that day, either. Actually, this isn’t uncommon – when UPS “delivers” a package to our store, they are actually delivering it to a third-party company that covers the last 30 miles from Ketchikan to the island, because UPS doesn’t actually deliver to the island. They let the floatplane company, Taquan Air, handle those last miles. All well and good.

What was disturbing (or interesting?) about the email announcement in this case was, rather, the fact that although the email was delivered at 10:16 AM, the package was allegedly delivered (past tense, was) at 3:42 PM.  That means that somehow, the notification had arrived via email from the future! “Wow, if UPS has solved that one, they can’t be stopped,” I mused.

Over the last two weeks I made some frames at the frame shop.
These anime or manga characters (including baby Yoda at the bottom) were drawn by a local resident’s teenage son, and he had them framed.

This fingerprint consists of biblical quotes.

This print is by Southeast Alaska’s most famous artist (possibly), Rie Muñoz of Juneau. This artwork was for sale in our store, hanging on the wall since the early 2000’s. I had actually considered it my favorite of all the Muñoz prints in the store, so I’m slightly sad to see it go – though I doubt I’d have bought it myself, at $190.

This is the frame that caused me so much grief last week. I broke the glass, and damaged the artwork (slightly). You can see the damage in the lower right – it’s a crease across the artist’s signature. I actually used an iron to try to work out the crease – but it’s still there. We gave a discount to the customer, who apparently said he appreciated our honesty with respect to the issue. I like the picture, though. It’s a bar in New Orleans, apparently where the famous poet Charles Bukowski used to hang out in the 50’s when he was in New Orleans. The painting is by a friend of the local resident here who had this frame made.

This frame is for my boss Jan. In fact, that man in the 1800’s-era photo is an ancestor of her husband, Richard’s.

This last one is a sale announcement for the month of May, made with “spare parts” lying around the frame shop and utilizing some “practice” mats I did. We’ve placed it in the front window of the store.

Over the last two weeks, I did a few picture frames at the gift shop.





If that last one looks familiar, well… I did the exact same image for another person, before. It’s the original 1922 Craig City townsite plan and survey. I guess there’s a nice, high-quality image available online, and people are getting poster-sized prints and having them framed. It’s the sort thing I could see doing myself. But I guess there’s no need, since others are doing it.
Beside making frames, I was also fairly busy at the gift shop working on making an “inventory of vendors.” It started out with realizing that the filing cabinet used to store vendor information was broken, so… I spent time repairing the filing cabinet first, so I could use it to organize the folders of the vendor information. I’m going to make a spreadsheet, I hope.

I only completed two frames for customers this week. I ended up busy with some other stuff.


I spent most of Wednesday helping the store’s owner, Wayne, repair the ancient and broken safe in the back office. That was pretty interesting. I learned a new skill.
We installed an electronic keypad opener for the safe to replace the old tumbler.

I’m going to keep the old, broken tumbler as a souvenir. Maybe install it on a hapless tree as a bit of conceptual art.

It was a slow week at the frame shop. I actually only made one frame for a paying customer – it was a repair job, at that, and not a new frame at all. The customer was very pleased, though, because in taking apart the frame, I found a bunch of “long lost” family baby pics stashed behind the picture shown and sealed into the frame.

Sometimes the frame shop is slow not due to lack of customers, but because we rely on our supplier to send us the pre-cut frames ready to assemble for orders we’ve requested, and sometimes those deliveries are slow – that’s life on an Alaskan island for you.
To use up some time during my frame shop hours, I focused on improving my mat-cutting skills. I got adventurous, and tried some circles (using a special, very finicky tool) and some “lines” in box shape around the cut area of the mat (I’m not sure what these lines are formally called, but they’re popular on high-end matting styles).
So I did a bunch of mat cuts and then dropped random objects – a company brochure, a cartoon cat I quickly sketched – into them to give them focus.