Friday, February 06, 2004

Gone for the weekend. This past week there's been a flurry of activity at the SC IV Area Office as I prepared for Cornerstone Project 2004, in Greensboro, NC. Now, at 11:45pm on the night before, preparations are finally ready (I hope!) and I'm off to my usual pre-conference fitful sleep.

This has been one of the most interesting preparations for any conference/project I've ever done, as I've had to visit most of the Family Dollar Stores in Charlotte. There are a bunch of them, and they all sell pretty much exactly the same thing, but the state of cleanliness & orderliness varies greatly across the city, pretty much paralleling the kind of neighborhood in which they're located.

Why is this? Is this a local store management issue? Do stores in poorer neighborhoods get less attention from the national chain? I spent the better part of the day thinking about this as I drove between stores and couldn't figure it out.

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