One of the perils of business is what happens when valuable and experienced people retire. This happened recently at the hometown newspaper, and it has taken some time for the rest of us to catch up with their duties.
The husband-and-wife team of Raymond and Candace Pepper stepped away from their jobs a couple of months ago. They’re past the government retirement age, they had done excellent work, first as carriers and then as employees, and the only thing you can do when good people like that decide it’s time to go to the house is wish them well.
Candace worked in the front office, where her main assignment was preparing the legal notices for publication.
She had no experience with this when she started working inside the building in 2018, after the Enterprise-Journal stopped using carriers for delivery. But she caught on quickly and for the past eight years, handling the legals was never a problem.
Business manager Linda Gentry does that work now, and she’s a quick learner as well. The problem is time.
Linda and circulation manager Teri Collins are the only two people in the front office now. There is no Candace to handle the 20 or so legals that get published each week.
Raymond did a little bit of everything, and that’s an understatement.
He collected payments from all the single-copy vendors in the area, kept an eye on the condition of our two delivery trucks and made out-of-town deliveries when another driver was unable to do it. He mowed the lawn and handled other building and property needs. That’s not even close to the full list of things he did.
When he retired, others took over some of his assignments. But one went undone for more than two months, until this week.
It was collecting the quarters put into our coin racks at a few locations in three counties. We collected weekly for papers sold through vendors like convenience stores, but after Raymond left, the coin racks slipped under the radar.
Once Teri, Linda and I got to them, we decided for efficiency to stop having someone travel from the office to get the quarters from the racks in Amite County and Walthall County. Now employees on their way to the office from each county get that money once a week.
That left the coin racks in Pike County, and another employee agreed to handle those. But this week, we gave him the wrong key to open the racks. So I agreed to go to three of the racks later that day.
The quarters had not been removed for 10 weeks, so I knew there would be a lot of them. Teri had provided large bank deposit bags to hold the expected overflow.
Still, I was surprised when I opened the first one, and the coins literally spilled out of the rack. Hundreds of them.
It took a few minutes to collect them, and then I was off to my next stop. There were even more quarters in this rack, and almost as many at my third and final location.
I knew the racks would have a lot of coins, but I didn’t expect that many. After all, it now takes six quarters to get a paper. That’s a lot for any buyer's pocket.
If you’re thinking I shouldn’t discuss this because money is involved, maybe so. But dividing the money collected by 10 weeks, each coin rack sells between $8 and $12 per week. That’s not worth a thief’s time and energy.
On the way home, I called Teri to tell her about the cascade of quarters, and said, “I had the most fun!”
I got to see 10 weeks of sales in each rack. It was proof that despite changing reader habits, we still have newspaper buyers. I do miss the Peppers, but subbing for Raymond this week was a treat.
