In the Farm Fragments exhibit at the EAGM, there is a display of old but very real cheques that served as legal tender about 60 or more years ago. The cheques supplied by one bank were altered to indicate either a different branch or different bank altogether and they worked! No electromagnetic codes or ID chips required, just an honest signature.
That part of the display brought back memories of simpler days in retail business when counter cheques were provided to small town businesses to give to their customers who might want to pay that way rather than cash. Credit cards were unknown and, at that point in our history, not wanted.
Those cheques brought me back to my first lesson in business reality offered by someone other than my parents.
When I was just a kid, working after school and weekends in the family store, I got to know the downtown community very well. It was comprised of about 50 or 60 hard-working, realistic merchandisers offering everything from groceries and snacks to giftware, clothing, farm equipment parts, new and used vehicles and their repairs, entertainment, and so on.
There were three general stores. One was located right next to ours, owned and operated by a genial Chinese fellow named Sing. That's all, just Sing to me. Sing Woo if you needed the whole name, but we didn't. Then there were Jack and Joe, two Jewish guys who ran general stores on opposite ends of the intersecting Avenue.
Because of location, we did most of our incidental grocery and general ware shopping at Sing's. But because we were in business, we understood the importance of stopping at Jack's and Joe's on occasion.
One Saturday morning at Joe's store, I got that first outside instruction in money management from Mr. Direnfeld himself.
In our family, the general rule of merchandising, marketing and economics was that you bought the merchandise, you sold as much as you could with a fair mark-up price to hopefully produce a profit. You then paid property, business, provincial and federal taxes. You paid for the utilities and repairs, you paid your staff, suppliers, ad agencies, et al and then if there was anything left over, you paid yourself. In bad months, you didn't pay yourself and sometimes some of the others had to wait before they got what they deserved.
Joe, on the other hand, noting that we were the first customers of the day, accepted our cash, put it in his cash register and then reached in, pulled a dollar bill out and stuffed it in his pocket.
"That's my dollar, Norman," he said, patting me on top of the head. I shrugged. It had been my Mom's dollar 11 seconds earlier, now it was his, or his store's dollar.
"That's my pay. No matter what kind of business day it becomes, I take that dollar. I pay myself first. Just a little, or else why am I here?" he said with a shrug.
It made sense to me, because the rest of it, as far as I knew, was the same thing as what we did in business. Except he took that little bit off the top and made no apologies, just an explanation.
Decades later I read the wealth building book entitled The Wealthy Barber that was all the rage for a year or so. I was about 60 pages into this tome that had netted the author a huge profit, when I realized what he was expounding on was simply a rarefied version of Joe Direnfeld's philosophy of business. Don't cheat, don't neglect other obligations, but dammit, if you're going to work hard, take the risks and put in the hours you deserved to be paid at least a little bit, even if it was going to be a bad day, or a bad week.
Obviously I never forgot that little 101 economics lesson.
Of course in today's new economic order, a loonie a day, stuffed into a jar and forgotten, isn't going to do you much good or would it?
Deserves some thought, I believe.
