Take That Job and Shove It

In 1977 my brother Mac and I opened a brand spanking new grocery store in Reynolds. I graduated from college just in time to sign the note with him. We paid $2732.32 per month on that note. That doesn’t sound like a lot now but it was a huge amount in 1977.

That bill came every single solitary month along with all the other bills we had to pay for operating a modern grocery store.

Mac and my dad also bought a funeral home in nearby Roberta at the end of 1976. I signed the note on that one too.

We also ran the ambulance service for the county.

So we were running two funeral homes, a grocery store and an ambulance service.

We would feed ‘em, take care of ‘em when then got sick and bury ‘em when they died. We had it all covered.

We worked day and night. It never ended.

I was ready to go back to fraternity life at the University of Georgia.

We didn’t mind the working but the problem was the grocery store was losing money. Mac and I would get together on a Saturday night and ask each other, “How much money did we lose this week?”

On my first wedding anniversary, Kathy and I had a really wild celebration. We unloaded and put up groceries on the shelves at the store until almost midnight.

Thankfully we sold the store after 3 or 4 years

And we survived.

But looking back I did learn a lesson I never forgot.

I learned that worrying doesn’t help one bit. There is no telling how many hours I was up at night when I should have been sleeping worrying about how we were going to pay the bills at that stupid store.

Worrying never paid one bill.

Actually I learned another lesson from operating that grocery store that may be greater than the worrying lesson.

I learned I never want to be in the grocery business again.

I think my brother Mac will agree with my learnings.