I wanted to title this column ‘Adhesive Stickers are not our Friend’. But, as I thought about it, I realized that wouldn’t begin to cover everything that I want to talk about today. In a nutshell, what I do want to discuss is all of the weird things that we do in this business that no other business has to do. Let’s start with adhesive stickers.
On more than one occasion, I’ve had to nearly fight it out with the person behind the Publix bakery counter. I like to occasionally buy a dessert, as a lunch treat, from their deli case. They take out the big tray, and then place the dessert I’ve chosen into that plastic clamshell container thingy. Then, they punch some buttons on that machine that spits out an adhesive sticker with 1,000 words on it (ingredients), plus the price and the barcode. It’s here that I ask them to not put the sticker on the package, I’ll just carry it. And that’s where the trouble starts.
I tell them that I don’t want the sticker on the package. They tell me they have to put it on the package. I tell them they don’t, they can be left separate. They say no. I say yes. They put the sticker on the package anyway. I tell them that I don’t want it now and walk away. Now they have to figure out how to cancel that sticker for inventory purposes. Me, I just skip dessert that day and will try again tomorrow. But why do I do that?
Adhesive stickers have one big advantage, and one big disadvantage. The advantage is they stick to almost anything. The disadvantage is almost everything sticks to them. When you work in an industry where everything that you handle is relatively small, and extremely expensive, random adhesive stickers lying around become a problem.
How many times have you had to go through your trash to find that missing ring or missing diamond? Have you ever found what you were looking for stuck to a random sticker that was in your store? I have! Hence, no more random adhesive stickers lying around. If I do get one in my shop, I first look it over to make sure nothing is stuck to it, and then I’ll roll it into a little ball, and squirt it with Windex to kill any adhesion left. No diamonds are gonna get stuck to that little ball and get thrown out with trash. As I said earlier, Adhesive stickers are not our friend!
But, my/our weirdness doesn’t stop there; it applies to all of the trash cans in my store. I currently have 9 trash receptacles around my store. Nothing that can rot, stink, or decay is allowed in 8 of them. Leftovers, soda cans, used napkins, paper plates, etc. can only go in one. And that one trash receptacle is in an area that never has jewelry anywhere near it. That’s the trash can I empty into the dumpster every day or so. It’s also the only one I don’t sift through beforehand.
The other 8 trash cans are mostly just paper and such and can go for months before needing to be emptied. When it’s time to ‘take out the trash’, it’s a several hour ordeal. I get a new trash bag, and very carefully, piece by piece, I transfer everything from the trash can to the new trash bag looking for anything that shouldn’t be in there. Jewelry can get brushed off of a desk with your elbow and you’ll never know about it until you can’t find it a week or a month later, and you’ve already looked everywhere and start to panic. What do you do then?
If you’re like me, you start going through the trash, hoping to find it there since you’ve already looked everywhere else. Its right about here that you wish you hadn’t been throwing your leftover lunch in that trash can for the last two weeks. But, on the positive side, it’s kind of like a trip down memory lane. And yes, I have been doing this religiously for over 30 years.
Another weirdness, that’s probably just me, is I don’t throw used Kleenex in the trash can, because I don’t want to handle it again on ‘trash day’. Instead, I do this. When a Kleenex box is empty, I keep it out of the way on my main work space and open a new box of Kleenex. When I need to dispose of a used Kleenex (hey, it’s allergy season), I dispose of it in that empty box. When the new box is empty, I then throw the old one away (that’s now full again) and start the process all over again. Yeah, that’s probably just me.
Do you save all of your mail packaging? I do. Since I also do trade work, I get quite a few packages over the course of a month. I have a designated area in my shop where I store the packaging after I’ve taken out whatever was sent to me for repair. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve had to go back and look through it because it wasn’t packaged very well, and something came loose and was lost amongst the packaging material – usually stuck to a piece of adhesive shipping tape!
Two or three times a year, that area gets full and has to be emptied. I’ll come in on my day off and, piece by piece, I’ll carefully go through all of that packaging before I’ll chunk it in the dumpster – just in case! Also, you’d be surprised at the number of people that will send you a job with no return address on the job envelope or paperwork. The only way to send it back is to find the original packaging and get the address off of that. That actually happened to me just last week.
Now, this one is just for the shop crews. Do you have ‘a sweep hole’? I do! And I’ve always had a sweep hole. What’s a sweep hole you ask? Allow me to explain. Think about what happens whenever you need to empty out your bench tray. Do you just dump it all willy nilly into whatever container you save your bench sweeps in? No, you have to go through it and pull out all of the sizing stock, the little diamonds you dropped, the watch batteries, and all of the broken saw blades before you pour it into your sweeps container. Now, think about everything you’ve dropped on the floor.
In a jewelry shop, things go flying more often than we care to admit, like stones flicking out of your tweezers, or pieces of gold flying out of a ring. If you’re lucky, you hear it hit the floor. And the fastest way to find it is to sweep the floor.
As soon as you spot whatever you lost, you also notice all kinds of other things down there as well. Pieces of gold, that 2mm ruby you lost a month ago, and that earring post you’ve been trying to find for 3 days. And, just like with your bench tray, you have to go through everything you just swept into a pile very carefully. But, since you just spent 15 minutes looking for whatever it is you just dropped, you don’t have time right now. So what do you do? You create a sweep hole.
My sweep hole is behind a door in my shop that I hardly ever close. Once I find whatever I was looking for, I just sweep everything else behind that door. It’s safe, and it’s out of sight, and out of mind.
When it’s finally time to start pulling all of my refining together, I’ll actually gather up everything in the sweep hole into a dust pan, and go through it with the same care I did when emptying my bench tray. If you don’t have a sweep hole, it’s because you didn’t know they exist. Now that you do, find an out of the way spot that won’t be disturbed and start your own retirement savings account right there!
Am I the only one, or does anyone else out there have some weird quirks that you employ to safeguard the precious baubles that customers entrust to us? If so, send me a message and I’ll do a follow-up on this weird little bubble that only we live in!
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