Black CEO Was Refused Service In Her Own Jewelry Store — 11 Minutes Later, Every Employee Regretted It

For the first three weeks Octavia did not tell the staff. This was deliberate, and it was the Carrows' suggestion as much as hers. The transition inventory had to be completed first: every piece in the cases, every item in the safe, every repair job in progress, every consignment record, all counted and logged, so that the handover would be clean and no one could later say that something had gone missing in the change. The inventory was slow, detailed work, and Octavia did most of it herself in the evenings after the shop closed, with the help of a quiet inventory clerk the Carrows had recommended. She counted trays, checked serial numbers against the ledger, opened the safe and logged its contents drawer by drawer, and read through the repair log, which recorded every job the bench had taken in over the past two years. She learned the shop's rhythms from its paper: which suppliers delivered on time, which customers came in every spring for a cleaning, which pieces had sat in the cases for months and which had turned over quickly. She learned the names of the staff from the payroll records and from the notes the Carrows left her: Hugh Ashford, the manager, who had run the floor for eleven years and knew the regular customers by name; Tamsin Kirkland, a junior sales associate of twenty-four, who had been with the shop for two years; two other sales associates; a bench jeweler who worked three days a week; and a part-time bookkeeper who came in on Thursdays. She did not meet them yet. She wanted the inventory done first, and she wanted her first visit to the shop as its owner to be informed, not ceremonial. She wanted to know what she had bought before she stood in front of the people who worked there and told them that she was the person who had bought it.