The Buy-Out

It seemed to happen wherever I went.  Every company I worked for was bought out.  This was slightly different.  Celebrity Chef and his partner Celebrity Wine partner finally decided to sell.  Let me re-phrase.  Celebrity Wine partner HATED the Boss.  I mean hated with a capital H.  When he called on the phone, you could hear his seething.  When he came in, he was cordial to the staff, but you could hear his distaste for anyone who answered his questions. 

Celebrity Wine Partner would call up and BARK for the Boss.  If he wasn’t there he had a shit-fit.  If he was, we had better have the right everything.  One time Celebrity Partner came in to entertain some guests.  They spoke Italian so I could not relate, but what a son-of-a-bitch he was.  Angry a lot?  Yes, he was.  But, I could see how he was a shrewd businessman.  Then he lost a lot of weight, got a new prime time show and became even worse if that was even at all possible!!  On that show, he criticized a blind girl.  A blind girl!

For years, the owners fought.  Their history went like this:

Somewhere along the way, they started to loathe each other.  In the beginning it was all Boss saying that Celebrity Chef tantalized me with cuisine from our home country; cuisine I had not had in years.  Celebrity Chef cooked for the Boss to persuade him that the Store was all about his way of life.  In the end, Celebrity Chef won out, even though the recipes were not the same.  Boss was the main owner, and his Celebrity Partners were financial backers and lenders of their faces to promote The Store.

They launched The Store and someone along the way they lost their love for one another.  It became a matter of Boss wanted to buy Celebrity Partners out, but Celebrity partners wanted to buy Boss out.  Boss won in the end.  He surrounded himself with new partners who had backgrounds in the financial industry.  And when they came in, the Store was never the same.
The Store always had that local store feel, the feeling that a family ran it.  The new partners were all about money – making lots of money especially when they sunk some mad cash into the place.  They busted out the wall of the office so that the old conference room was now part of the office and Boss’ office was more accessible.  It was one big room and one extra office space with an actual door was made.  We now had central air, new, fresh, paint and some new equipment.  With change brings more change.  They hired a CFO.  CFO came in and brought everyone into the office one by one and said, you no longer have a salary and you work on commission.

WHAT??

That would have been swell, had they thrown me some real big fish who bought consistently all year round, but I had the shitty hit or miss customers.  From then on, my checks fluctuated so much I didn’t know whether or not I could afford to live each month.  This is when I had to start checking all of my event pay because sometimes, they would forget to pay me or short me.

Peter became a partner and eventually, they hired a new woman that the sales people reported to.  She was an idiot.  Around this time, Arnie had just disappeared.  We didn’t know if he left or was fired.  He just vanished.  Arnie had some of his own food businesses on the side, but to have your immediate supervisor just not be anymore with no mention of it, was strange. 

Eventually, I picked up some good new guys, the wine club, the wedding registry and I ran the shit out of those services.  I’m an organized, type-A freakazoid, and I ran them so smoothly and efficiently.

But, my efforts were not appreciated by Boss or CFO.  Boss reviewed my numbers and I never hit my goals since the numbers were pulled out of someone’s ass anyway.  Boss started to look at me with annoyance and he made constant threats to the group about people getting fired, whilst he looked at me when he said it.

CFO also changed our hours.  Instead of coming in at 10am, we were now to be in at 9am and staying late was mandatory.  Now, add on the Sommelier time and I might just have to sleep in the streets of the city since I’ll be living at work.

It was also during this time, that my colleague was sent down to be the man on the floor, and I was sent back upstairs to the horror show of the telemarketing format.

At least Boss could pay his bills now.  We used to get shut out by our vendors because Boss never had enough money to pay the bills.  More embarrassing was when they sent an invoice that warranted cash on delivery.  But now, he had his financial partners who knew jack shit about the wine business and the new pay scale was enough to make me find something else.

I’ll never forget the words of my first corporate boss.  “You have your home life and your work life.  When the line gets blurred, it’s time to move on.”  And move on is what I did.

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