Company Blog

Painfully Memorable

by Adam Zack — October 17, 2018

We’re actually bleeding money.

One of my very earliest lasting memories is from when I was 4 years old.

My mom’s husband at the time was yelling at us that we had to get going (where I don’t know) and I was running across the living room, tripped and smacked my face right into the coffee table. Blood was all over the place and my lip was split open. I think that made him madder, but somehow, I was taken to the hospital and got my first set of stiches. (There were several more trips over the years). I clearly remember the chaos, pain, blood and my huge fat lip. I have many other vivid painful memories too – falling out of a tree on Easter and getting stiches when I was 9; crashing on my bike while doing ramp-to-ramp jumps in 5th grade and breaking my collar bone; falling off a motorcycle and cutting my chest and getting 13 stiches when I was 12; walking through a plate glass sliding door when I was 17 and cutting my arm; heartbreak in high school and diving to get out of a closing garage door and dislocating my shoulder when I was 22. And there’s many more. Holy crap, it sounds like I am the most uncoordinated person in the country. Or the unluckiest. The point of all these tales of woe and mayhem is that our memories of BAD THINGS (I hate it when bad things happen) are the most impactful and offer the greatest opportunity to learn and make changes so that the pain can be avoided in the future. And it generally works. I don’t run through the living room with reckless abandon anymore and sure as heck don’t dive under closing garage doors. We need to take the same lessons that we learn from life pain to our stores. Failed health department inspections, employee accidents, bad customer experiences and sales opportunities missed because of disorganization are all painful events that we don’t learn from fast enough. Sometimes we haven’t learned quick enough that we’re actually bleeding money and positive cash-flow is the life blood of every healthy business. Just ask Sears.