Cause & Effect

Cause & Effect

One of the blogs my instructor asked us to write about was the cause and effect issue. The main cause and effect in my life lately is the subject of my business.
I love my store. I love being my own boss. And while it doesn’t provide any income for me it allows me to share my passion of scrapbooking and rubber stamping with others. I get the chance to get together with other people and create. I get to spend time with my children and their friends in my store creating new things and having a good time.

And since it wasn’t making money it became more and more clear to me that I was not going to be able to keep the store open at its current location the way things stood. Shortly after reaching that decision there was a posting in the Kenyon Leader about a position managing the local thrift store. I applied. I wasn’t hired for the job. At first I was bummed. I was hoping to get the position to have a better opportunity to put to use the skills I’m learning while attending college. I was also planning on using the money earned to finance my Scrapbook & Rubber Stamp store.

When the man called to tell me they were going with someone else he offered me a different sort of opportunity. The foundation he runs not only owns the thrift store in town, but an art gallery housed in 3 adjoining buildings. The foundation was offering me space in one of those buildings to house my scrapbook store, rent free, in return for managing and running the gallery, which had previously only been open on Saturdays and not even that for the past several months.

Effects are pretty good for me lately. Here they are:
• No overhead expenses
• Move visibility
• Support of a large community organization
• Increased traffic to my store because of the location being the main corner of town
• Significant increase in business in the past 3 weeks – doubled the sales from the first 3 months in just 3 weeks at the new location

Not all the effects were positive
• Managing the gallery brings more responsibilities and no pay for the time
• Re-opening a store that was closed for a long time means there is a lot of cleaning, organizing, and other work to do
• More hours devoted to the gallery means less hours devoted to my own store
• My time is more divided between the stores and my family and thus less time for school work
• So much on my mind pushed some important things out of my mind

Life seems to be one big cause and effect paper when you really sit down and think about it, don’t you think?