How Retail Saved My Life

This is the origin story of The Retail Doctor. It doesn't start in a store.

September 1, 1974

Scott said he could get tickets to John Denver at the Universal Amphitheater. Four of us went.

You walked in and looked up and there were stars. Behind the orchestra, four giant video screens stood dark and waiting. This was before MTV. Before music videos. Before any of that.

I had never seen a live performance outside of a church. Never seen a live orchestra. Never seen anyone performing under the stars. And here was a man who was on the radio everywhere, forty feet away, and it felt both monumental and intimate at the same time.

The lights went down.

Out of the darkness, a single voice and a guitar.

Then the announcer: "Ladies and gentlemen, John Denver."

He opened with "Welcome to My Morning," a song about newness and possibility, about waking up and deciding that today you will create something. I have listened to that song before every keynote I have given for the last thirty years. Every single time. Because that feeling of standing at the edge of something you made, that resonates in a way I have never been able to explain fully.

During The Eagle and the Hawk, an eagle appeared on those screens. Then a hawk. Sweeping across four panels of light in a room open to the California sky. 

The strings started working. The music built. I stopped breathing.

The whole orchestra and John held a single note. Everything suspended.

The conductor, Lee Holdridge jumped in the air and cut it off.

The silence lasted two seconds. Then the audience erupted.

I had been spellbound. And somewhere in those two seconds of silence, I had one thought, not a plan, not an ambition, just a feeling that took decades to name.

I want that again. To be among all those instruments, all those people, making wonder together and connecting.

That sense of possibility, I felt it that night for the first time. And I have felt it every time I stood in the wings before a concert, every time I walked out to a stage to speak.

It never got old. It was never supposed to.

Decades later I had the chance to speak with Lee Holdridge about that night. I told him what it had meant. He said: "Yeah, I learned that one from watching Lennie."

Bernstein to Holdridge to a kid in the audience who would spend the next 50 years trying to create that same suspended moment for other people. The lineage of a single gesture.

The Ferrari

In the fall of 1976 I started at Chapman College and took a part-time job at The Broadway department store to pay for it. I was eighteen years old and I was failing my music courses and I had no idea what I was doing in either place.

The store shuffled me from department to department wherever they needed a body. Notions. Housewares. Men's findings. Nobody explained what I was supposed to be doing. You just stood there and waited for someone to need something.

I was so bored I wanted to disappear.

One afternoon in notions, I noticed a battery-powered Ferrari on the shelf. Red. About the size of a shoebox. It was supposed to sit there and look like merchandise.

I took the batteries out of the package, put them in the car, and drove it out onto the floor.

Up the aisle. Around a fixture. Down toward the escalator.

Old people stopped. Kids stopped. Parents looked up from whatever was in their heads. Smiles happened. Nobody told me to do it. Nobody asked me to do it. I just did it because I was curious what would happen.

What happened was people followed me back into notions. They asked questions. They picked things up. They bought.

Then a security guard appeared. He told me I couldn't do that down here. I needed to put it away. So I did.

About ten minutes later the store manager called up to notions.

"Why the hell did you stop playing with that car?"

I said the security guard told me to stop.

He replied: "Are you kidding me? You just sold two of those. We hadn't sold two all year. Not even at Christmas. Get back out there."

I went back out. We sold four of the five they had in stock that afternoon.

I hadn't been trained. I hadn't been coached. Nobody told me there was another way to work a floor. I just found one myself because I was bored and curious and willing to look stupid.

That was the first time I understood that the job wasn't to stand behind a counter and wait. The job was to create a reason for someone to stop.

What Retail Was Saving Me From

I want to be clear about what was happening in my life when The Broadway found me.

College wasn't working. I was failing my music courses and the people around me, the ones who were serious about piano and opera and the life that went with it, had made it clear I wasn't really one of them. I remember the day two of them showed up at the mall. They had just come from a concert nearby. They walked into the store and stopped cold.

You actually work here? That's why you missed the concert?

Not mean exactly. Like I had already decided to settle.

Home wasn't much better. My mother had two older sons. She thought she was marrying one man and found herself living with four. She had told me more than once, directly and in front of guests, that I was supposed to be a girl. She wasn't being cruel exactly, just honest in the way that lands harder than cruel. By the time I was eighteen she had stopped looking for happiness and plowed everything into her work as a science teacher. The house was functional. It wasn't warm.

I didn't have a lot of places to land.

What I had was the floor at The Broadway. And what the floor gave me, once I stopped waiting to be told what to do and started figuring it out myself, was the first real evidence that I was good at something.

Not in a classroom way. Not in a way that required anyone's approval. Just the clean, immediate feedback of a customer who bought something because of how I made them feel.

I didn't go out and drink my way through my twenties. I didn't disappear into whatever my friends were doing to get through those years. I put my nose down and worked and got better and got promoted. By the time I was 22 I had bought my first house.

Retail didn't just give me a career. It caught me at a moment when I could have gone a lot of different directions, some of them not good. It gave me a place to put the energy and the curiosity and the need to prove something.

It saved my twenties. I came out the other side intact, and the floor is a big reason why.

17 Letters

By high school I had found my way to music. My choir teacher gave me conducting lessons. I became the first student to conduct the school's Baccalaureate and Graduation ceremonies. I liked it enough to bet my future on it.

Remembering Lee Holdridge, I enrolled at Chapman College specifically to study conducting. What I didn't know was that the program was designed to produce music educators, not conductors. You didn't even get to take conducting until your senior year. You had to build the foundation first: ear training, piano proficiency, a second instrument, practice rooms, theory.

After my first semester, I had D's in every music course except choir. A's in business and English. The evidence said wrong room for music. Something inside said stay.

I staged a senior conducting recital that nobody asked me to do at that scale. Twenty-five singers. Twenty-five orchestra members. Six sections of Bernstein's Mass. An obscure Beethoven overture that scared me. My choir mentor told me afterward: you learned more about how to put on a concert and make people work from that one night than from four years of classes.

He was right.

My student teaching assignment finished the rest of it off. Thirty young boys, all trying to play Stairway to Heaven on untuned guitars. I walked in and thought: there is no version of this job I want.

So I did what made sense to me at the time. I wrote 17 letters to Broadway conductors and asked them how to break in.

Three wrote back. All three said the same thing: start as a rehearsal pianist. The man conducting Annie said he only got his shot when the conductor didn't show up one day.

I wasn't a good enough pianist. I knew I didn't want to be in a classroom. The door was closed.

The Western Store

I had made great commissions selling shoes to augment my scholarships, and when a new store opened in the mall, I went to work for a western store. I figured I could do that - selling is selling.

The smell of leather hit me when I walked in. The boots lined up on the walls. The hats. The whole place felt like a movie set, like stepping into a costume, like I could be somebody else for a while. There was something safe about it even as I told myself I had failed. That's what I believed. That retail was where you went when the real thing didn't work out.

Country music played all day. Songs about cheating and rain and being left alone, all that messy human wreckage I hadn't lived yet, coming through the speakers while I worked.

My job was to take a man in a three-piece suit and turn him into a cowboy. Not by telling him to try on a hat and laughing at how stupid he looked. That's what the tourists did. My job was to say: "Notice how this sits above your ears. Notice how it frames your face." Then get him into a pair of boots and the right jeans and watch what happened when he stood up straight.

He held his shoulders back. He stood taller. He was transformed. He looked in the mirror and saw someone who could pull it off.

There were three kinds of customers.

The man in the suit, who came in on a Saturday because his wife had bought tickets to a benefit that night and the dress code said western. He was stiff. Skeptical. Certain he was going to look ridiculous. Get him into boots and watch his posture change. By the time he left he was walking taller.

The guy in sweats who shuffled in looking like he had nowhere else to be. No confidence, no budget he'd admit to, no idea what he was doing there. Those were the ones I liked the most. Because when you got the right outfit on someone who had stopped believing he could look like anything, and he saw it in the mirror, something shifted in his face before he could stop it. A smile. A confidence. And of course, an, "I'll take it."

And then the guy who already knew everything. Came in with a picture in his head of what a cowboy looked like, usually wrong, usually based on a movie. Shirt three sizes too big, pants baggy enough to hide in. No girl was going to want to dance with him, let alone go home with the guy. But he didn't know that. He thought he had it figured out.

Those took the most care.

You couldn't embarrass him. You couldn't say: that doesn't work. You had to move slowly, let him feel like he was discovering it himself. You'd get him into something fitted, something that actually showed he had a body underneath all that fabric, and you'd watch the comic book slide out of his back pocket while he turned in front of the mirror.

When you cracked that code, when you found the version of him that fit, something happened in that mirror that had nothing to do with denim or leather or a hat.

He, too, had been transformed. 

Through making those sales I felt like a winner. I was rebuilding my own confidence at the same time I was building theirs. Trying on the persona of retail consultant. Learning that what I was actually selling wasn't a hat or a boot or a pair of jeans.

I was selling hope. That they could pull it off. And if they couldn't yet, I kept working with them until they could.

I didn't have a name for that yet. But I was already doing it.

They had to feel they mattered before they'd buy

That wasn't a policy. It wasn't a training manual or a customer service philosophy. It was a decision I had made a long time before I ever walked into that store, made by a kid who had been judged before he opened his mouth, who had been told what he was before he had a chance to show anyone what he could do.

I knew what it felt like to stand in front of someone and need them to see you.

So I looked. Every time. At every person who walked through that door.

That's still the whole job. 

Years later I hired a young woman for a client of mine, a local retailer I had done a makeover with. She had been commuting two hours each way to a corporate job. This was supposed to be a step up. On the day she got her first check she posted the check on social media: "this is a sign of how far I've fallen."

I had written that post myself. Not in those words. But I had felt every word of it.

The difference between her and me was thirty years. Thirty years of learning that the room you think is beneath you is sometimes the room where everything you have is actually needed. That the person who shows up to sell boots or candles or running shoes or jewelry isn't a failure who ended up there. They are the reason someone walks out of that store feeling seen.

I became The Retail Doctor to tell her what nobody told me when I walked back in.

This place is not beneath you. And neither are you.

What Makes Me Mad

I walk into a boutique or department store. Lots of mirrors. I can see myself coming from twenty feet away, and I can also see the associate standing behind the counter, back to me, phone in both hands. Every few seconds he glances up, finds my eyes in the mirror, and goes back to the screen. Doesn't move. Doesn't speak. Waits for me to do the work.

What I see in all of it is someone who has checked out. Who is living in the virtual world and treating the actual customers in front of them as an interruption.

And here's the thing I cannot shake: it is not their fault.

The managers pulled them off the floor to do tasks. Restock this. Count that. Face the shelves. The store cut the headcount, so there's nobody else to learn from, nobody to watch work a customer, and no senior associate demonstrating what good looks like. And nobody, not one person in their entire employment, ever showed them there was another way to stand on a floor.

They're bored. They're understaffed. They're getting no recognition for the right behavior because nobody has defined what the right behavior is. So they do what any human does when the environment gives them nothing. They find their stimulation somewhere else.

They never got their Ferrari moment.

That's what makes me mad. Not the associate with the phone. The entire system above them that decided training was a cost instead of a responsibility, that cut the salesfloor staffing to the bone and then wondered why conversion was flat, that handed someone a job and never once asked what they were capable of.

I found my instinct by accident in a notions department at The Broadway. I was eighteen, bored, and willing to look stupid. Most associates today never get that accident. Nobody creates the conditions for it. And the potential just sits there, untouched, until the person quits or gets let go and the cycle starts over.

I'm not okay with that. I haven't been okay with it for thirty years.

The Question Nobody Got Right That Changed Everything

After 14 years in retail, not long after I had received the highest increase in sales from South Coast Plaza, the number one mall in the world, I sat in a room with 60 people while the company owner asked what a business's greatest asset was. I said, "It's employees." He answered, "Wrong." He went around the room. Nobody got it. He finally said, "It's customers."

I went to his office afterward. I told him we had built this company on the people who showed up every day and delivered for the customers. Customers are fickle. They'll go anywhere. Employees are the reason they come back.

I gave my notice. Two weeks later I was out.

A few months later I returned to the Universal Amphitheater, now covered, this time for a Tony Robbins seminar. I took away one thing he said: come up with a brand nobody else can do better than you.

I went home and filed the trademark for The Retail Doctor.

What This Is Really About

I almost failed music school. I had classmates who had lived for music their whole lives. I was just trying it out. The program wanted me to be an educator. I wanted to be a conductor. Neither of those things happened the way I planned.

What did happen was that I eventually founded my own chorus, which became one of three resident performing arts organizations at the Karen and Richard Carpenter Performing Arts Center, a thousand-seat hall in Southern California. For fourteen seasons, we presented three concerts a year, often with orchestra.

Talent isn't always where you think it is. Sometimes you swim upstream for years before you find the current that was built for you.

I didn't become The Retail Doctor because I needed a job. I became The Retail Doctor because I finally found the room where my talent already lived.

I know it's working when I walk into a store and see it. An associate who isn't performing a job but living inside one. Someone who genuinely enjoys watching a customer fall in love with what they just bought. Two people at a register laughing together. A customer who came in as a stranger leaving as something closer to family.

The highest compliment a customer can give isn't a five-star review. It's when they reach for the salesperson's hand - not the other way around - on the way out and say, "Thank you."

Or when they turn back and ask: "Are you the owner?"

Nobody drives a Ferrari around a department store floor at eighteen unless making people feel something is already in them. That's what I've spent 30 years teaching.  The path is never straight. But the talent leaves clues the whole way.

PS. If you want to see what this looked like in practice, here's the case study that got me a full spread across the top of the Business Section for the Sunday edition of the New York Times.