All of a sudden, the room was spinning. Violently.
“Janice… I’m going to-”
Janice, because she knew her better than anyone else, had the garbage can ready in a flash. She didn’t know about the baby. No one did. No one but Amy.
With the death knell tolling and the Troll trolling in their little conference room, hell, his conference room, retching up one’s breakfast was probably a perfectly acceptable response.
“I have to say, I was ready to join you,” Janice admitted. “What the fuck is going to happen to this place? To all of us? We’re like a family. That prick came here and he’s going to break it all up. He’s going to get rid of the good in this place.”
Teela took a deep breath and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Janice gave her a sympathetic look and quickly walked off towards the back, where the dumpsters were in the parking lot behind the store, to get rid of the evidence.
She didn’t have time to respond. She barely had time to slam a hand down on her small ancient metal desk and sway herself into her chair before the room started spinning.
Her secret was safe, for the moment. It might be more than she could say about her job.
She was so royally screwed. They all were.
By The Troll.
CHAPTER 2
Ross
The mom and pop shits like this supermarket were the worst.
It left Ross wondering why the hell he bothered. He had more than enough money to just sit back and relax and enjoy the rest of his life. He didn’t need to do crappy takeovers of shit companies that had been losing money not just for years, but probably for decades. How the hell people managed to feed themselves, pay their staff, and keep the doors open was beyond him. Unless the people who just filed out of the tiny piece of shit room that served as some sort of conference room, actually assembled and creatively brainstorm inventive ways to lose more money, agreed to be paid with the groceries on the shelves that expired. Or in the food they grew on the roof or in whatever backwoods jams and meat they were carrying.
Good god, the company was a disaster. Fortunately, the location was good. Nester Falls was located forty minutes out of Philly. It was a good opportunity to score some ultra-cheap real estate in a market where not much went up for sale. Right off the interstate, it was a real gem. People stopping in and out all the time. It was probably the only way the place survived all those years without shutting down and going out of business.
Ross paced around the tiny conference room. He had yet to call in the few people he had to fire. It wasn’t a job he enjoyed, and he was sitting there, trying to catch his breath after his announcement of the takeover. Judging from the glazed eyes and shocked expression, everyone needed a minute.
It wasn’t exactly his first rodeo. He had a chain of grocery stores and he had no doubt that this one would one day be worth carrying the name Grand Day’s Grocery and Convenience.
The real problem with the mom and pop stores wasn’t the loss of profit or the horrible management, the never ending red in the books. No, it was the people. The staff who remained stubbornly loyal to ghosts of days gone by. The mom and pop themselves who clung to their building like it was the last remaining lifeline in a sea of corporate evil and greed.
Ross didn’t exactly term his business or type of management as corporate, greedy, evil, or cutthroat. He was too nice. Way too nice. He’d had to cut that shit out over the years.
He’d worked hard to make his money. He’d struggled for years, until his app took off and then he could finally, finally start investing in grocery, like he’d planned for. After the app, his stores happened to take off. He’d struck gold and like any real gold strike, it happened all because of his dedication. A hell of a lot of people told him to give up, but he’d refused. People knew his name now. He could expand and roll now world wide – the whole money made more money thing.
But god help him if people found out what he’d done before that when he was desperate for a few extra dollars. When the app was still in production and people kept telling him to call it a day and get a real job.
Good thing that the system was private. If someone remembered him and decided to breach privacy just to embarrass him, hell, he’d deny everything. Say they confused him with someone else. Bury them in the shaming of letting out private information. Use it as an example as to why people should be worried about information breaches.