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Getting revved up about my business has been difficult lately. My usual enthusiasm for retail has been somewhat diminished after learning that my beloved father has been diagnosed with inoperable kidney cancer. To add insult to injury, he was hospitalized with a massive heartache.

Contemplating marketing strategies, researching consumer trends, and all that goes with retail seems trivial for me at a time like this. The bottom line in retail is to get someone to buy “some thing” and yet, the old phrase, “You can’t take it with you.” has been endlessly ringing in my head. It is only now that it has taken on any personal meaning.

My father’s influence is felt in everything that I do. My parents live three streets away from my home where I live with my husband and children, my extended family lives nearby, my shop is four blocks from my home, and my son’s school is a block away; the same school in which I attended as a child.

As a child during the Depression, my father and his younger brother would walk for miles from the barrio to look at the homes in our neighborhood. His dream was to, one day, have a modest home near Balboa Park ,in which to raise a respectable family. This dream seemed for him as distant and realistic as going to the moon like Buck Rodgers did in the movie serials he would watch at the Saturday matinees.

His persistence, determination, and hard work paid off and step-by-step he accomplished his childhood goal. We were raised in a neighborhood where we were friendly with our immediate neighbors. The neighbors from the surrounding blocks were known from either from school or church.

Each weekend, our shopping was done at independent ‘Mom & Pop’ businesses were my father knew the owners or clerks. I learned the give and take of buying and selling and how loyal relationships were built between customer and business. You may shop somewhere because your classmate’s family owned the store. If you needed a service, you used someone that you knew from the church parish. Business owners stood behind what they did because of the social ties, and instinctively knew the value of word-of-mouth reputations.

As a child I learned decorum and how to behave in a place of business. You did not want to be unwelcome in a store for unruly behavior, nor would you want to embarrass your parent by being scolded by a clerk. In turn, owners were kind because one day I would hopefully grow-up to be one of their customers.

Learning about the loose social ties that bonded independent retailers and customers taught me about how to treat my own customers. Live by the golden rule. The wealth gained from my business comes not only in the money that I make from selling my wares, but from the satisfaction that I achieve from treating people well.

Our customers may not be able to take the material possessions that we sell to them when they leave this world, but hopefully, they will feel that their life is richer for having been treated with kindness and courtesy. So, you see, the ever ringing “You can’t take it with you.” is simply the material ‘it’ you’ve purchased from our little shop. However, the ‘it’ that we hope you will take with you is the immaterial sense of having visited with proprietors with a true sense of family and community so that you may take whatever ‘it’ is and share with others.