Shopping for a Living: A Memoir on Merging Marriage, Motherhood, and Merchandising

By Mimi Pockross

Mimi Pockross, wife and mother of two young boys, is newly entrenched in her adopted city of Denver. Feeling very isolated with no real friends and few contacts, she decides to open a southwestern arts and crafts gallery. At the same time that she is pursuing her quest to turn her gallery into gold, she is paying back a hefty loan, combing Santa Fe, New Mexico and its environs for her inventory. In addition to facing the many struggles of a new business owner, she is also overseeing her childrens school and home life, cooking, cleaning, doing laundry, and tending to her busy husband. Its the 1980s, a time of economic volatility, changing roles for women, and the usual daunting obstacles associated with raising a family. Shopping for a Living is the unique tale of a woman who wants it all and does her best to achieve that goal.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 19, 2009
• ISBN: 9781440166785

Mimi Pockross

Mimi Pockross is a freelance writer who writes about family issues. The mother of two sons and the grandmother of two boys, Mimi lives in Denver and Vail, Colorado with her husband of forty-nine years. She is also the author of “Shopping for a Living: A Memoir on Merging Marriage, Motherhood and Merchandising.”

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Contents

Preface

INTRODUCTION—

The Big Move

Looking for Sunshine

Settling In

The Denver Scene

Dealing with Culture Shock

CHAPTER ONE—

The Road to Retail

The Stay-at-Home Mom

Back to Work?

Rejections, Rejections

What Should I Do Now?

The Shrink, Silverado, and a Girlfriend

CHAPTER TWO—

Getting Down to Business

Going Blindly Into the Ring

My Husband, My Partner

The Business Plan Took Me a Year

The Concept

The Competition

The Niche

The Numbers

The Bankers Made Me Quiver

CHAPTER THREE—

Putting It Together

Choosing the Location

Hiring a Designer

Hiring a Contractor

Choosing a Name and a Logo

Stocking the Store

Hiring an Employee

CHAPTER FOUR—

The First Year

Let the Games Begin

The Daily Drill

I Love Your Floor!!

The Grand Opening

My First Christmas and Wads of Money

Following Christmas

Off to Dallas

Retail Turns Cold

I’m Reviewing the Situation

CHAPTER FIVE—

Learning the Ropes

How I Managed

Out of Cash

What to Do?

Turning Things Around

Crunching the Numbers

Time Is Money

CHAPTER SIX—

Honing the Craft of Retail

Refining the Concept

Shopping for a Living

Merchandising the Store

The Art of Promotion

Ode to the Customer

Who’s Running the Store?

CHAPTER SEVEN—

The Family Business

Juggling

My Take on Nannies

The Home Front

Family Fun

Milestones and Mishaps

The Kids Move On

Empty Nesters

CHAPTER EIGHT—

Building the Business

Expanding Once

Expanding Twice

How to Grow a Business

CHAPTER NINE—

The Business Is Always for Sale

The Offer

The Deal

The End

CHAPTER TEN—

Life After Canyon Road

Free at Last—No Deadlines

What to Do With All That Cash

Too Soon to Quit

More Jobs and More Goals

Getting Breast Cancer—Another Correction

After Breast Cancer and Settling Down

CHAPTER ELEVEN—

Looking Back

No Regrets

Some Reflections

Special Memories

Highs and Lows

Life Lessons

Credits

Bibliography

To my husband, Keith, for his love and his partnership

To my sons, Steve and Adam, for their love and their support

To my mom and dad for their love and their lessons

And to Jen, Camilla, and Zeca for helping to make

the struggle worthwhile

There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.

James Russell Lowell, New England Two Centuries Ago, Among My Books, 1870

Preface

I decided to share my dual experience of being in retail and raising a family because a) I think retail should be documented more frequently and more realistically and b) because I wanted to share my way of balancing work and family with other families who are trying to achieve the same goal.

It has taken me seven years to sift through all of my saved materials and accurately recall what went on during my retail years. Luckily, I had many records and files to help me fill in the details. As I look back in time, I am amazed at the number of names and faces of those who were in some way a part of this great experiment.

Though there are many people who influenced the final outcome of Canyon Road, I am particularly grateful to a number of mentors, role models, and supporters whose contributions helped me achieve my goal. A special thanks to Lee Philip Bell for making me believe that women can have it all; to Joan Towne for convincing me that a woman can operate a retail store as well as a man; to Henk Newenhouse, who taught me the art of creative promotion; to Shari Press, who showed me how to have a Santa Fe style; to the late Sam Arnold for his breadth of knowledge, his verve, and his Santa Fe condominium; to his gracious wife, the late Carrie Arnold, who often accompanied Sam in his endeavors; to Pat Crofts, who gave me a great sendoff; to Al Anthony for his taste and his expertise; to Richard Lindsay and Stella Teller, two of my most favorite artists; to Joanne Henkel and Mitzi Handler, whose record for tending the store exceeded all others; to Jill Richman, Mary Kay Bael, Carolyn Miller, Peggy Dunn, Christy Cutler, Anne Pickard, and to the late Ruth Kobey, for their loyalty and their involvement; and to Dudley and Rhonda Smith, who purchased the gallery and extended its lifetime.

I’d also like to thank all the parents and friends of my children, who filled in for me when I couldn’t quite balance things out; my friends and customers who took over for me at the gallery when I had a momentary crisis; my husband’s clients, who often patronized the gallery and who tended to my children when I was absent; to my customers’ children for their work at the store, most notably Jen Sarche, who became my daughter-in-law; and to my family and friends, who all showed up on occasion.

Most importantly, I’d like to thank my fabulous children, Steve and Adam, for their flexibility, tolerance, and many opinions.

And, of course, above all, I’d like to thank my sweet and wonderful husband, Keith, whose unending enthusiasm as well as his business acumen kept me coming and going.

I am blessed to have had a chance to own Canyon Road and to share this experience with the people I love and with a wide array of fascinating and colorful individuals who helped create a most vivid experience.

INTRODUCTION—

The Big Move

Looking for Sunshine

It hailed on August 31, 1980, the day my family and I moved to Denver from Chicago. Overcome by the altitude, we sprawled out on the fifties-style gold carpet in our new living room and waited for the moving truck. I was thirty-seven, my kids were eight and seven, and my husband was nearly forty. My mind drifted back to a morning three months earlier when my husband suddenly inquired, What do you think about moving to Denver? Skeptical, I turned to face him. Huh? I said. You don’t even own a pair of jeans.

Not long after that, we packed the car with the kids and the dog and headed west for a new adventure.

We moved to Denver from a North Shore suburb in Chicago, where we’d resided in a comfortable house that we’d just finished remodeling. Our kids had been immersed in school activities, baseball, friends, and routines. We’d just joined a swim and tennis club. My husband was a partner in a fast-growing law firm, and I worked part-time and did some volunteering. We were the epitome of the upwardly mobile set. My husband drank martinis on the commuter train, and I planned parties and shopped for clothes to wear to the supermarket. When we decided to move to Denver, my husband grew fond of saying, I could picture what we’d be doing for the rest of our lives.

The journey I took from being a complacent suburban wife and mom to an ambitious business wife and mom, while clinging fiercely to the traditional values of both, is the story of this book. It is about how and why I chose to start a store, how I dealt with my duties and obligations, and how I maintained my ideals of hearth and home. The story involves a desire to be respected, the sacrifices and the heartaches endured in order to achieve this goal, and the surprising benefits of stretching my limits.

The year we moved to Denver was the year that Ronald Reagan became the fortieth president of the United States. His election sparked a renewed interest in supply-side economics and a belief that good fortune will come to us all if we deregulate industry and become involved in making money. This philosophy was very good for real estate and business in general. It was the beginning of the me generation—that is, I want it now, and I want it big. It turned out to be the perfect time to be enterprising.

Ironically, it seemed like every time I turned on the radio, John Denver was warbling Sunshine on My Shoulder Makes Me Happy. Our Karma pointed west.

Settling In

We moved to Denver ostensibly for a better quality of life; we both felt the competitive pressure intensely in Chicago. We lived and worked among the best and the brightest and, though the financial rewards were great, time to enjoy life was minimal. Keith commuted back and forth to work for three hours each day. Many weeks he traveled and would not return home until the weekend, which meant that the bulk of the responsibility for raising our boys rested primarily on my shoulders. Nine years before we moved, Keith’s boss had headed west to Colorado and invited Keith to join him. I was pregnant at the time, and we both felt uncomfortable about leaving our family, all of whom were located in Chicago. When Keith got a second opportunity to join his former partner in Colorado, we were a little more convinced that the move would provide a more laidback environment in which to work and raise our children. We thought we could work hard but enjoy life a little more.

Basically, we moved on a whim. We knew nothing about Denver. We had no social connections beyond some cousins of my father and my husband’s former Chicago partner. When we’d traveled out West for a vacation several years earlier, we’d passed Denver in favor of Colorado Springs and Aspen.

Rather than selecting a home in romantic Evergreen or trendy Boulder (my husband’s choices), we chose a Denver community (really a development) close to town that had good schools and would be an easy commute both for my husband and, since I planned to work, for me as well.

The kids were soon immersed in school and activities. Unfortunately for me (not them), they were on a year-round school system, which meant that after every quarter, they were off from school for three weeks. When they were home, there was a limited number of things to do. That meant I had to plan activities for those periods.

Keith immediately adapted to Wall Street West. He loved Denver’s work ethic—get to work early and be home at 4:30 so you could still enjoy the sunshine. It was too hard to completely toss the twelve-hour workdays he’d known in Chicago, but he compromised. He actually took time to coach the boys’ baseball team. That lasted two years.

The Denver Scene

We arrived in Denver when it was in the throes of a big oil boom that was occurring throughout the Southwest. Oil drills were ubiquitous throughout Colorado, Oklahoma, and Texas, and the banks were feeling flush; outsiders were streaming in from all over the country to cash in on the development associated with the boom. The carpetbaggers tended to be very young. When we moved to Denver, the median age was twenty-six. It’s now in the mid-thirties. I remember thinking to myself, Denver is where it’s at—meaning that it was a hot spot that was only going to grow. Grow older wasn’t a phrase I considered.

The money was flowing, as were the liquor and the partying. The town was hopping every night. You’d go to Buck and Cindy’s Colorado Mine Company, drink lots of wine and beer, eat a hunk of steak, and meet lots of good-looking new wealthy folks. Just like in all those westerns that depict the conquering of the West, people flooded in from everywhere to settle here—San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, New York—but not to the exclusion of the West’s base population of folks from Nebraska, Iowa, Oklahoma, and rural Illinois.

To our surprise, we found that Denver’s history had always revolved around great booms and great busts. But that revelation came later!

Dealing with Culture Shock

Unlike the other members of my family, who quickly settled in, I was totally disoriented, much more than I thought I would be. The kids had their school, my husband had his work, but I missed my Main Street and my friends.

Everything was spread out. The fire station was in Denver, the police station was way south, the library was half an hour away, the nearest grocery store was fifteen minutes in another direction, and there were no parks nearby.

Though everyone was friendly, I didn’t feel that I had very much in common with my new neighbors or the new friends I was fortunate enough to meet. Most of the people I met had known each other since they’d moved to Denver years before we arrived or had grown up together. To be honest,