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Stefanie Salavantis: The enemy within the home

When your family owned a store years ago, one of the most useful phrases in your vocabulary was &ldquo;it&rsquo;s me.&rdquo; You&rsquo;d shout it anytime you came in the front door, which probably had a jingling bell, and you didn&rsquo;t want mom or dad to have to rush out of the office, thinking a customer had stopped by for some smokes or a half pound of bologna.
				&ldquo;It&rsquo;s me,&rdquo; if you thought about it, was a daily exercise in family togetherness &#8211; giving mom or dad a chance to rest their weary dogs for another couple of minutes in the midst of a 12-hour day.
				My parents owned a little variety/deli on Wilkes-Barre&rsquo;s East Market Street in the 1950s and 1960s. Here are some other lessons our store taught.
				Kids can do surprisingly good work. In eighth grade it began to appear to me that the best contribution I could make to the family business was helping to keep the shelves stocked.
				So it was that a junior high school kid became a pusher of cigarettes, sodas and candy bars. If you could smoke it, drink it or eat it, I ordered it and displayed it in quantity, preferably near the cash register to make the customer think &ldquo;I need that.&rdquo;
				Many years later I watched a leadership training film that told me generating an air of busyness and success is the first step to creating genuine busyness and success for your company. Hey, I&rsquo;d figured that out at 13.
				Mental agility is attainable. Our system for years was an imposing 1920s cash register with a powerful bell, later replaced by an adding machine that made you feel like a techno wizard when you pulled the big handle.
				For smaller purchases, though (maybe a can of Prince Albert and a newspaper), I tended to do the addition in my head. Then I&rsquo;d do the subtraction to figure out how much change to give for a five or whatever. If the guy wanted three tins of Prince Albert, there&rsquo;d be multiplication in the mix.
				I still can&rsquo;t figure out why people hold up two cans of corn and look puzzled. &ldquo;You divide the weight into the price and don&rsquo;t forget the decimal,&rdquo; I feel like shouting. But I contain myself.
				Pinball makes good citizens. We generally had a pinball machine or two in our store. Fueled by sodas and smokes, the young guys could spend hours pumping nickels and roaring at one another&rsquo;s &ldquo;tilt&rdquo; messages.
				To this day, the old pinballers I run into are Vietnam veterans, family men, volunteers in their churches &#8211; absolutely wonderful people. Was it firing metal balls and frantically working the flippers to build up a score that equipped them for life?
				I have a fantasy about busting into a video game competition with a couple of old pinball machines in tow, shouting &ldquo;get off those dang cyber whatsits with their pictures of zombies &#8211; here&rsquo;s your future.&rdquo;
				A bakery across the street shapes your vision. Some may aspire to California coasts or Manhattan high rises. But I think of our old commercial street and the not one but two bake shops just upwind from us.
				Keep your BMWs and second homes. To this day, my values involve fresh cinnamon rolls, crusty rye loaves, jumbo bags of cookies and &#8230; I can&rsquo;t go on.
				OK &#8211; the family store experience of yore wasn&rsquo;t an MBA from Harvard. But every time you shouted &ldquo;it&rsquo;s me&rdquo; you were entering something a lot larger than you knew at the time.

Remember When: A variety/deli and two bakeries — Ah!