Furnishing Benefits

Aaaand... it's me chatting again about furnishings and things, which I once swore was the Most Boring Thing.
Ha.

I don't care about owning things that match--I prefer a jumble of styles--but I was excited to see a set of matching flatware come into the store yesterday. I only have two knives/forks/spoons, and I've been hoping to find more I like.

This was a set of nine--far more than I need *--but it's suitably Star Trekkish for me... stainless steel and teak, modern Scandinavian design:

But.. eek, it's Dansk, which is expensive.
I took it to Ass't Man whose policy is--because staff is paid so little--to way under-price stuff for us. Even when we weren't getting along, he always gave me a good deal.

I told AM that the silverware was Dansk––another manager wouldn't have known what that meant, but he does, and we've discussed liking Dansk before, when their cooking pots have come through (I have a couple). I said I knew it was worth a lot and that he should price it a fair (to the store) but hopefully a deeply discounted price.

He went with "deeply discounted" and skipped the "fair (to the store)" price:
He charged me our usual price for silverware, 49 cents per piece. Minus my 25% staff discount.

"I won't regret it later," he said, "but look it up and let me know what it really costs."

So...
It's not the super expensive and quite similar Dansk Fjord from the 1960s, made in Germany. It's later (1980s?), made in Japan.
But still––wow––you can find ONE piece of this silverware selling online (at an inflated price, but still) for what I paid for the entire set.

This sort of thing that staff does for one another helps keep down the resentment we all feel about working in sometimes unfair circumstances.
(Sometimes I get so angry about workplace crap--total disregard for any safety procedures, for instance, that I want to leave. We all do.)

It's not just AM. Other managers and staff do it too.
It helps in way more than financial ways.

Example: Every so often, we get workers who are doing community service time they've been sentenced to (for traffic violations and stuff). Frequently they are, um, reluctant workers. Sometimes worse. (Like, they steal stuff.)

But this month, we've had a great, great guy helping out--he is cheerful, considerate, and jumps in to help everyone. (It's a mark of the sort of workers we get that his behavior stands out as GENIUS level.)
He has a little boy who came with his mom to pick him up one day.
This little boy loves cars, so when a new, in-the-box electric Batman car came in--the kind a little kid can ride in--the worker asked if he could buy it.

Mr Furniture sold it to him at $25.
It's $200 at Walmart.
It's seeing this kind of kindness extended to others that matters to me even more than the financial benefits I reap.

Not that that doesn't make a huge difference in my life:
I almost never buy anything expensive like this Dansk silverware, but I do get almost everything I need at the store, and that makes the low wage (and no benefits) livable.

(Sadly, the free-food distribution in the parking lot every Wednesday has stopped, due to supply chain problems, complicated by the weird politics of "charity"--I won't go into it. But that free food was important to the staff too, and it's a big loss.)

I pass this benefit along too.

I've stayed in touch with a Former Volunteer [FV] at the store who left because the sexism of the place bothered her so much.

It is sexist, for sure, but it's a kind of honest, aboveboard sexism that doesn't usually bother me. Like Mr Furniture rags me about not shaving my legs!
But he also rags AM about how pale his legs are. I even joined in! "Like skim milk," I said.

The store's got all the other social problems and prejudices a place could have, but at root, my coworkers and I respect one another and even, for all our complaining, try to extend that to the worst of the customers, who can be lying, thieving, rude and even dangerous SOBs, big time.

Anyway, I always felt bad that FV got such a bum deal--she'd tried to talk to management and got nowhere. (They felt attacked and got defensive, and it's true FV has a rather rigid personality, but she was still right.)

When she was at the store, FV and her husband were finishing up a five-year project painstakingly restored his dead parents' beat-up old house, almost entirely by their own hands (hiring pros for the dangerous bits, like electricity).

They liked doing it so much, they've bought another trash house and have started again.
This one was built in the 1890s so it's got nice bones, but it was updated many times over the years with gunky materials, and it's been mostly stripped of original hardware.

FV has been looking for affordable replacement bits and bobs at garage sales and junk stores.
When this batch of door (and some window) ceramic and brass hardware came into the store, I sent her these photos, saying she could have the batch cheap, if she wanted it.
She was thrilled.

Those door key plates with the wings--aren't they're like some fantastic beast out of Harry Potter?
I don't want Victorian stuff myself, but I appreciate it.

And I love that people cherish and do the hard work of taking care of broken things.

_________

P.S. I used the silverware last night at dinner, and it was comfortable. A review of Dansk silverware said it would be, and that silverware designers face a unique question:
how does it feel in your mouth?

* PPS. After I wrote this, I realized I wasn’t comfortable taking such a deal from the store, so I took a set of four of the nine Dansk pieces back and put them out in the display case at an appropriate price.

That feels fair to me.