An Essay

Black Lincolns

From the Foreword to Nursery Lessons · Shane Michelli

On a Friday in the fall of 1982, most of the people who ran Woolco learned from the radio that the company was closing every store in the country. Twenty-five thousand jobs. The Baton Rouge paper reached Roger Mayes before headquarters did, and he told the reporter it was not true, that it had to be a misunderstanding about a few underperforming stores. They printed his quote in the same edition as the headline.

He was a regional director by then, responsible for opening new stores across the South, and he had one under construction that week. The grand opening went ahead in October. The going out of business sale started in November. He and the other district managers were summoned to a Sunday morning meeting in Dallas to hear the terms, and before the trip Roger made six phone calls. He and six of his district manager friends rented black Lincoln Continentals and parked them in a row in front of the regional office, nose to tail, like a funeral procession forming up. The top brass was not amused. There was not much they could do about it.

That is the half of the story people like. Here is the half that built a company.

Each of them was handed a group of stores to close and schooled by a professional liquidation firm. Roger says closing a store turned out to be an exact science; the firm had done it a thousand times. The severance came with a bonus for any manager whose stores recovered enough of the inventory's value in the closing sale. Roger's stores posted the largest recovery in the company. The bonus came to a little over thirty thousand dollars.

That was the seed money for Louisiana Nursery. Sixty days after the last Woolco closed, he was selling azaleas off a gravel lot at Florida and Flannery, out of a portable building he bought from the man who had been selling firewood there.

I have thought about those two Sundays more than almost anything else he told me, because they are the same man on the same weekend doing two things most people think are opposites. He said exactly what he thought, in a way nobody in that building would forget. Then he spent three months doing the best job in the company at dismantling the thing he had spent twenty-five years building. He did not sulk through the closing to make a point. He did not comply quietly to protect his severance. He protested on Sunday and outperformed on Monday, and the second thing is why the first thing is a good story instead of a sad one.

I have since sat in rooms where a company was ending, on both sides of the table. The people who park the Lincolns and then close the best stores are the only ones I have ever wanted to hire again. They are rare. Most of us pick one.

How you lose is the audition for whatever comes next. Roger's Black Friday was the best thing that ever happened to a Baton Rouge gardener. He would not have said so that weekend. He also would not have let a single store close badly.