Nigel Columnist: Cashier's firing is bitter pill for her customers

I got this from my favorite paper, by general pundit Nigel Columnist:

Angela Stakanycz is enjoying things she never had time to enjoy before, such as having lunch with friends. But she's not just breaking bread with pals. Her lunch mates are her customers.

"I've never had time for lunch in my entire life before, except after funerals," she says. "Now I'm having the time of my life. Aren't people way cool?"

Not everyone would include human beings and "way cool" in the same sentence - some newspaper columnists think that people are pretty repellent, all in all - but Angie Stakanycz loves life, which is why dozens of her customers have been lining up to get on her smoke break schedule and give her hugs. She needs them.

Stakanycz, 24, is a popular cashier with a loyal group of 2,500 customers, many of whom testify enthusiastically about her conversational skills and urge to talk at length with every customer that comes to her cash register. But at the moment, Stakanycz no longer is their cashier.

After 2 years as cashier at the GonzoMart on 94th Street in Bloomington, Stakanycz was abruptly dismissed from the staff on Jan. 10, and told to leave. Customers who came by to buy gas and peanut butter cups from her the next day were told simply that Stakanycz had left GonzoMart, and that they could pay their money to one of the convenience store 's other cashiers and have a nice day.

Her bewildered customers -- most of whom have been seeing her for months -- suspect that Stakanycz was dismissed because she treated them as people, not as customers.

"She commits to her customers whatever time they need," says Hector Bartleby, one of Stakanycz's erstwhile customers. "She doesn't have ring the register to know who you are or what your cigarette preference is: She knows everything about you. This is exactly the kind of cashier everyone is looking for and can never find."

Most of Stakanycz's 2,500 customers had no idea what happened to her, and -- as often happens in an employment dispute -- the reasons for her dismissal are unclear. A spokesperson for GonzoMart declined to comment on Stakanycz's firing, saying employment law prevents the company from discussing the reasons for her dismissal. One former manager noted anonymously "Angie, she talk so much with cusomters, it takes 40 minutes for customer to get through the line. We not pay her to talk. We like Angie, but she just talk, talk talk talk. I have business to run!"

Stakanycz's brother, meanwhile, also had little to say.

"We will not speculate as to GonzoMart's motivation," says Jeff Stakanycz. "But we will unequivocally state that we are not aware of any wrongdoing on the part of Angie, or of any customer-care issues."

GonzoMart, which employs about 500 cashiers in five midwestern states, has the right to terminate employees with 60 seconds’ notice. But Stakanycz was only given 21 seconds to clock out and sign her last time card before being told to leave the convenience store . She says she wants her customers to know that she didn't do anything wrong:

"I don't have any problems with alcohol or customer relations or drugs or cash-handling judgement," she says. "I get extremely high customer satisfaction reviews, and the only things I'm addicted to are coffee and smokes and "bad boys" and Metallica. I'm not a controversial person. I'm not secretive -- everybody who buys Powerball tickets from me knows everything about me. I will do anything to help my customers."

Her devoted customers say she was particularly good at dealing with customers whose personal problems were complicated and who needed extra time. But in a world where convenience stores are under increasing pressure to process customers as quickly as you can get seen at an Allina clinic, there isn't much room for a cashier who takes as much time to chat up a customer as a customer wants.

A study by the New England Journal of Retail showed that the average convenience store cash-wrap transaction is just 20 seconds long. But Angieela Stakanycz doesn't believe in Jiffy Lube customer service.

Stakanycz says she saw up to 400 customers a day, but often worked 12-hour days, staying even after the convenience store was supposed to have closed and the receipts were supposed to have been deposited and the security system turned on to finish seeing them all.

"I work as long as necessary to see the people who need to be rung up," she says of her practice. "That's the glory of it all: We're here for each other, and that's always been my style. My allegiance is to the people I've had the pleasure of seeing. What hurts me is that now these people don't have a cashier."

Her large number of customers ranged from adolescents to people in their 90s and included mechanics, lawyers, other cashiers, postal carriers, newspaper columnists, schizophrenics, and performance artists. If there was one common denominator, it may have been that her customers were fiercely loyal.

“I had to wait an hour to see her the first time," says Bartleby, whose wife, father and children also bought gas, cigarettes and cat food from Stakanycz. "But after your first visit, you wouldn't mind waiting four hours. I think that's what [GonzoMart] didn't want. She spends a lot of time with customers, but they want cashiers to get the customers in and get them out."

"I can't even put into words how upset I am about this," Grone says. "To take away our cashier with no notice and no explanation is beyond belief."

Many of Stakanycz's customers express a similar attachment to their former cashier, and a similar sense of anger at her abrupt dismissal.

"This has just been devastating for a lot of people, and it came as a complete shock," says Joanna Plubadouf, an Eden Prairie psychotherapist who was one of Stakanycz's customers and who has dozens of Stakanycz's other customers among her own list of clients.

"A lot of her customers feel that it's a betrayal by the system, that they've been cut off from a very important and very trusted cashier," Plubadouf says. "Angie Stakanycz is incredibly skillful. She's very willing to deliver customer care in her own way -- spending more time, staying late. She's formidable and she's unique. Unfortunately, often times in large systems, being formidable and unique can be threatening to people. But I'm utterly puzzled."

Bert DuToit, a laser eye surgeon whose wife, Buffy, was among Stakanycz's customers, is also among the mystified.

"Angie's really a wonderful cashier," he says. "She's almost a dying breed -- a cashier who spends a lot of time with her customers and knows them not just by the hot dogs and coffee they buy, but as human beings. Maybe she's not the kind of person who should be working for a big corporation more interested in efficiency and speed. She'll schmooze with her customers as well as take care of them. And they really do love her."

And so Angiela Stakanycz, ex-cashier., waits for what's next, enjoying lunches with her customers, hanging out with her boyfriend, Raoul, and wondering where she will work again.

That's all she wants to do.

"The issue isn't me," she says. "The issue is all these wonderful people who have been left stranded, without their cashier. People are in shock over this. Is there a place for comprehensive conversation with compassion in this world? I've had the glory of seeing the greatest people. That's what hurts. If GonzoMart called up and said, 'Oops, we made a terrible mistake,' I would be back at work tomorrow morning.

"I just want to see my customers."

Oh, all right. It's a spoof.

I know. Meow.

The above, of course, is lifted from Sunday's Nick Coleman column in the Strib, via the miracle of global search and replace. [LEGAL NOTE] It is intended as satire. [/LEGAL NOTE]

Going to the doctor sucks. The personal touch of doctors like Dr. Cain, the subject of the column is a rare thing indeed - and has been since I was a kid. And having been fired from more jobs than many people have in their lives, I appreciate the shock of it all, and feel Dr. Cain's pain. Really.

But Allina is a business, for better or worse. Their job is to try to manage the cost of health care. If you've looked at your premium statements, you know this is a difficult business, one that involves carefully minding the little things, and occasionally the big things (fairly ruthlessly judging whether a procedure will be cost-effective in treating a patient given their condition, age, and the cost and reliability of the treatment - and if you're a single-payer health-care proponent and think that that sounds positively ghoulish, and don't see the contradiction, you really need to do some reading). In between and on a more mundane level, one of the ways this is done is by getting the most productivity possible out of doctors. "Productivity", in this case, is measured in patient visits per day. Doctors' time is not cheap, especially when grinding through a huge number of primary-referral patients whose cases are, to them (naturally) the most important thing in the world, but to the HMO are as routine as can be. Dr. Cain, the doctor in Coleman's column is a doctor I'd love to have as a patient - indeed, if she resurfaces in a clinic that's in my provider's network, I'd love to try to sign up. But if I were an Allina exec, knowing that time is money, in the sense that it's peoples' ever-tighter-stretched premium dollars paying for the luxury of that one doctor's benificence - it'd make for a tough decision. But the decision was there; Dr. Cain, like the cashier in my spoof, spent time - her employer's time - on things that made the patient/customer (and the reader) feel better, things that I'd love to have in my own doctor visit (but have never expected) - but that take away from the return on the premium dollar spent by the other patients, the clinic, and Allina (a non-profit corporation) as a whole - which is conceptually not much different than a cashier that doesn't work according to policy. Work sucks.

I worked for a company that ran a number of major HMOs. It is an essentially cold-hearted business underpinning a field that by its nature should not be. It's a creature of adaptation, designed to make the best of a very difficult situation, the current near-hyperinflation of health care costs. It was difficult, learning of the case management procedures and their impact on the lives of real people, in some of the extreme cases that occasionally pop up, even knowing that those procedures were what made health care affordable at all to the employers, unions and other providers involved. I was happy to leave the business.

The funny part? I'd suspect (but can not confirm) that faux-populist Coleman favors single-payer health care, the fabled (and much-fictionalized) Canadian or British systems or some such. And in those systems the "abuses" and depersonalization that Coleman laments in his column are ever more the rule than even the most hidebound procedurally-addicted American HMO.

By the way, the column provides ample evidence that Coleman is populist like a faux. Read this:

"I had to wait an hour to see her the first time," says Grone, whose wife, father and children also saw Cain. "But after your first visit, you wouldn't mind waiting four hours. I think that's what [Allina] didn't want. She spends a lot of time with patients, but they want doctors to get the patients in and get them out."

A whole hour? Shut my mouth!

Where in the world does Nick Coleman go to the doctor? Between checking in and waiting in the exam room, I haven't waited less than an hour to see a doctor more than a few times in my adult life, or with either of my kids, including quite a few emergency room visits (and even those were usually well over an hour). And that's right, Mr. Grone; Allina wants to get its money's worth out of ever minute of its doctors' time. It's a part of keeping things affordable for the rest of us.

NOTE: The "column" by Nigel Columnist was created by editing and adding to Nick Coleman's column. I cite Coleman's column as the original, and do not claim that it is original writing. The editing was done for purely satirical purposes.

Posted by Mitch at February 7, 2005 05:58 AM | TrackBack