The trials of changing hands at the LNS....

My LNS owner sold her shop and retired as of a few weeks ago. She had stopped ordering stuff in May, understandably. She was trying to reduce her inventory before the sale. We (her customers) understood that, and shopping in there became a little more difficult as she started running out of stuff, but we managed because we knew the new owner would stock back up.

I went in there today for the first time since the new owner took over. Oh my! There's nothing in there. I was quite frustrated there today. She's restocked a lot of the threads, but a lot of other things are gone. I understand the old owner took a lot of things with her when she left, which doesn't make much sense to me really, but that's the way it is. I asked the new owner about some of it and she said she was concentrating on stocking the threads first and then she would start ordering charts and magazines and such.

I ran into another customer of the shop on the way home, and she was telling me that the new owner is planning to focus on needlepoint and scale back the cross stitch, or that's what she told her a few days ago anyway. She told me that the new owner wasn't planning on carrying many things, like GAST and several lines of charts that were carried before. This is not what I was told when I was in the shop today, so I don't know what's true. Maybe the owner changed her mind. The customer also said that she was complaining that business was slow so far. Well, there's nothing to buy in there! And if you're not planning to carry cross stitch, it's not going to pick up either!

This is entirely hearsay, I know, but I dearly hope it isn't true, for the sake of the stitchers around here, but also for the new owner. If this is indeed her plan, she's going to get a rude awakening when she has no business. The overwhelming majority of this shop's business is from cross stitchers, not needlepointers. If she decides she's not going to carry cross stitch, she's going to be in major trouble very soon unless she clues in. I don't have a lot of money to be buying stash right now anyway, but I think I'll give her another 6 or 8 weeks before I go back and see what she has then.

As for a stash report, all I bought were some overdyes for TW's new bookmark freebie. I was planning to kit up the dragon freebie, but I'll have to do that on another day when I'm feeling more patient.

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A quick report on yesterday's job interview if you haven't seen it on the BB: I don't think I'm going to get the job. It turns out she wants someone with a car to run errands, pick things up from vendors, get lunch for meetings, etc. Why this requirement of a car wasn't mentioned in the ad or over the phone, I don't know, but it should have been. It would have saved us both a lot of time.

Now why they don't have a company car for these things, I don't know, and that seems a little risky to me. I don't think they really have any ill intentions in having people drive their own cars on business, but it seems the professional thing to do to have an insured company car for people to drive on company business. When I worked in retail, we had delivery and pickup service available, and if you were on the clock, you took the company car. You never ever took your own vehicle for business purposes, unless you were assigned to training or something off site instead of your normal branch.

In other job news though, I got a call from an agency that is apparently filling a position I applied for. I'm going to go see her tomorrow. I also got a test date from the civil service department of the city of Long Beach to go take their written exam on Monday. Wish me luck!