Everything

 In my tales of the workplace, I have spent perhaps an inordinate amount of time discussing my experience as a purveyor of sliced "roast beef" sandwiches clad in brown polyester. Not the kind of attention my career as an elementary school has garnered, but you might imagine that I spent a decade there. 

Not even. 

But I do carry a scar from that tour of duty. 

The scars I carry from working on the loading dock of Target are all internal. A few days back I felt that emotional tissue tingle just a bit when I read the headline: "Target shifts away from being an 'everything store.'" Quelle surprise! As a grown up, my wife and I have a habit of making a date out of our trips to what we had believed was "an everything store."

Not anymore. 

Quelle damage.

Where might I have gotten this impression? 

Perhaps from those nights I spent in my youth in the back room of my local Target, unloading forty foot trailers. We took merchandise off the trucks and organized them according to the department that each item belonged. Housewares. Toys. Hardware. Automotive. Electronics. And so forth. Sometimes we would run across a something that defied categorization. This gave us on the crew a moment of consideration before one of us would say, "Notions." We had a pallet for "Notions." And if we filled it up, we would get a pallet jack and drag it off into the cavernous warehouse to be set aside for whenever we run out of "Notions." Then it would be the job of someone else with a red vest, which would distinguish them from the urchins in the back room unloading the trucks, to deliver those items to the shelves in that mystical realm located somewhere in the store. 

Somewhere. 

I knew where Garden was. I knew where Electronics was located. 

Notions? That was the place where Everything was unloaded. Did you need a desk organizer? Look for it in Notions. What about those felt pads that you stick on the bottom of your chair legs to keep them from scuffing the floor? That's a Notion. 

And that's why you go to Target. Because Target is not just an Everything Store. It's a Notion Store. 

And that's Everything to me.