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Bummer news yesterday: apparently NCG (National Cooperative Grocers) won't be hosting a Co+nvergence conference in Saint Paul this year. They plant to pick it up again in 2025.
So, the tentative calendar item I had for that this August? It's been moved to 2025. This bums me out for more than just the conference itself, which I was really looking forward to returning to. But, I was also coming up with all these ideas for adding a few days to that trip so I could go up to the tiny town of Baudette, Minnesota, on the Canadian border, where my mom's biological sister, Aunt Cyndi, lives. It would basically be my one chance to go visit here where she lives. I could even have potentially thrown in a long day trip to Winnipeg, Manitoba—which is a three-hour drive from Baudette.
I always talk to Steve, the guy from HR who is also part of Book Club and who actually quit his job at PCC and had his day last Friday, about this stuff, because he grew up in the Twin Cities. A few months ago, he told us this wild story of his younger years when he was crossing the border and he wound up getting strip searched. He had not mentioned the town where it happened, I don't think, but when I mentioned Baudette last night, he said, "That's the town where I got strip searched." Wild.
He also theorized that Co+nvergence getting skuttled this year could have to do with how much PCC looms large over both that conference and NCG, and how tight things are expected to be here over the next year could be a contributing factor. I hadn't even considered that, and it didn't even occur to me to what degree NCG overall is financially connected to us, as by far the largest grocery cooperative in the country. (We have fifteen stores. The next-highest number of stores among any other co-op grocers is four stores.)
Anyway. Now I need to figure out some other place to travel to in August. If nothing else I could consider addin a day or two to our trip to the Washington Coast for this year's Biannual Family Vacation.
Danielle texted me the other day that she has a coworker friend who is going to Iceland Pride, also happening in August, and she sort of invited herself to come along. She was clearly insinuating that I should consider coming too, but at first I told her the dates were the very week after I was to be in the Twin Cities. Now though, I won't be—so, I thought maybe I
could consider going to Iceland after all; we hear all the time about deals on airfare to Iceland. Well, I just looked up flights to Reykiavik in August, and the nonstop options
start at over $700. That kind of immediately shot down any idea of this as a viable possibility; even one-stop itineraries started at over $500. And I'm still clinging to the sliver of hope I have of Shobhit agreeing to go to Toronto and Niagara Falls for the 20th anniversary of our first date. There is no way both of these things are in the cards.
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So, Book Club: as of yesterday, with Steve no longer working at PCC, we have kind of shifted the Book Club off the "PCC platform." Mel still plans to share what book we are reading and anyone in the office who wants to join us is welcome to. The thing is, no one ever does. Deena did a few times, but she also left PCC not long ago. Mel, Steve and I have been the core three from the beginning (along with Kara, former Executive Assitant, until she left back in September).
Steve assured us shortly after the announcement of his departure ("There was no joy in it," he has said, of his job here) that he would still meet with us for the next scheduled Book Club. And then, last night, we all exchanged our numbers so we could start a group text. Or planning and coordination of Book Club meetings will now take place there, rather than over Teams at work.
Incidentally, we met at Cafe Cosmos shortly after 4:30—Mel and I walked over together from the office; Steve was there when we arrived—and it was not until around 6:00 that we even got to talking about the book we read (
America the Beautiful? One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled by Blythe Roberson, about a young Millennial touring National Parks; let's say our collective response to it was
mixed) or about our pivoting approach to Book Club moving forward. Up until then, we talked shop.
Again, there's a lot that it's just in my best interests not to repeat here, except I'll say: wow. Just . . . wow. Certain things, at least judging by this conversation, are more dysfunctional than I even realized. And I already had a fair idea.
Here is an insight that I
will share. This conversation, once and for all, disabused me of the long-held notion that it was far more beneficial for people in leasership positions to have been here their entire career. These days, that is increasingly a liability, with people holding onto increasingly antiquated ideas of "how things should be," and an inability to see the forest for the trees when it comes to a diversity of ideas that have been successfully implemented elsewhere. That said, there is a flip side: the mass exodus of "old timers" that has occurred over the past decade, many of them simply aging out and retiring, has left us with a dearth of passion. We used to be stacked with passionate staff, and it just doesn't feel the same to me anymore.
What all of this comes down to, really, is that the place I work for really isn't the "kind of place" that it has long pretended to be. Certainly not when it comes to "caring" about its employees, the optics around that notion getting thrown way up in the air over recent weeks and months. And how could it, when we have grown so much so quickly? I get back to the email I sent to our CEO about a year ago, in which he even told me he was struck by the phrase I used, "rapid growth breeds detachment." I felt a real acknowledgment of that as an issue around here. What I haven't encountered is any concrete solution.
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[posted 12:31 pm]
