"The key people skills -- love of customer, love of staff -- are what keep this place going," says Turf. "Anyone who doesn't see them as important has either left the company or thinks we're all crazy."
The fact that Turf, like Carole Segal, began her career as an educator is more than a matter of coincidence. Crate's management structure is top-heavy with people -- mostly women -- who came out of classrooms, where the fine arts of patience and communication are prized skills. In significant ways, too, Crate's stores function as showroom and schoolroom: Many have blackhborads over the cash register listing the names of cargo ships, their destinations, points of origin, and merchandise on board.Salespeople are expected to be able to lecture knowledgeably on, among other things, the differences among stoneware, earthenware, and faience as compared with porcelain. As the four-part, 140-page Crate Employees' Guide puts it, "We knew that to be truly successful we would need to develop an educational philosophy towards out customer. Our stores had to be a place where customers could come and have discussions with intelligent personnel about our merchandise, creating a relationship which would certainly carry a longer impact that either our advertising or our displays."
Carol Sapoznik, Boston regional manager and Crate's first bona fide management trainee -- she joined the company in 1971 -- traveled the typical corporate path of salesperson, stockperson, and store secretary and bookkeeper. One of her current duties is helping to implement a training program that embraces all full-time employees with at least one month's service. Although individual store managers do all their own hiring, says Sapoznik, responsibility for training is divided between instore counseling and a companywide continuing-education program.
"At the corporate level," she explains, "it's a three-phase system. The first we call Fundamentals of Selling. In groups of 10 or so, new employees meet at our warehouse facilities for a one-day workshop in issues like corporate structure and philosophy, salesmanship role-playing, add-on sales, how the buyers find new products, and so on. The atmosphere is meant to be loose and fun. Everyone is encouraged to ask basic questions like, 'Why do we sell this item?' or, 'How do I get promoted?' in a completely unrestricted forum.
"The second," she says, "focuses on product information. In Boston, we do this in four weekly sessions, and it involves part-time people as well as full-timers. One week we might do gourmet, the next dinnerware and glassware; one way or another, though, we cover every product category in the store. And the third [phase] is Design. Ray Aronson [Crate's corporate designer] put together a terrific slide-show lecture for us on merchandising philosophy, traffic flow, the effects of high and low crates, waterfall stacking, window displays, et cetera. The idea is to promote awareness of every single element involved in Crate's overall success."
Thorough as it is, any training effort relies heavily on sound hiring judgment at the outset. According to Lon Habkirk: "Gordon always says he can't make happy people, he can only hire happy people. He doesn't want any 'victims' working here." In that vein, Crate looks for recruits with a high self-image and, perhaps, a family background in retail, or experience in teaching, or -- talk about intense, service-oriented businesses -- restaurants. What the company doesn't want, particularly, are refugees from department-store training programs, where the yardsticks of responsibility and achievement are apt to be very different from Crate's.
"The atmosphere in this company is competitive," Sapoznik avers, "but not that competitive. People understand they have the chance to advance, to assume a lot of responsibility, but they have to be motivated themselves. Unlike department stores, all of our people are in management training.We don't have clerks working the floor. We put our best people on the front line, and that's where we're different. In a department store, you can always spot the buyers and managers. They're the ones who won't come over and ring up your sale."
Sapoznik recalls being invited in by the Harvard group doing the postmortem on DR. "They asked me how long I'd been doing sales and pricing," she says, "and I said, 'Forever.' If a truck pulls in, I help unload it. If a store needs sweeping, I pick up a broom. Gordon's the same way."
Further testimony to Crate's work ethic and corporate culture comes from Pat Eckerstrom, the assistant corporate designer in Chicago. Ten years ago, just out of college, she started as a secretary in the Wilmette store -- despite "never having typed a letter in my life." Having proved her mettle at Crate, she was hired away by a homeremodeling retailer at one and a half times her $9,000 annual salary; within a year she was back with Segal. The main lesson learned during her time away was how dreary retail could be when indifferent people sold inferior merchandise to an undiscriminating clientele.
