OLDS — Customers and staff have had a month or more now to get used to a major change at the town-owned Nu2U thrift store.
Its new manager, Gayle Anderson, has settled in and has been making some changes.
She previewed some of those changes during a recent interview.
“There are a few – I would even say – they’re not major, but they’re minor things that I’ve noticed,” she said.
“For instance, having more decorative items or eye-catching items in the foyer instead of -- you know, like -- basketballs or tennis rackets, kind of thing.
“We want to entice people in. So you know, we want to make it warm, friendly, entice people in, they see something in the window,” Anderson added.
“I’m going to be putting up some window shelves. They see something in the window and they’re going to be like ‘oh, I should pop in for a minute.’
And then you never know what you’re going to find, right?”
But Anderson, like Barb Adair, her predecessor, says the store is in great need of more volunteers.
Aside from the manager, the store is operated by volunteers.
“Right now we’re looking for as many volunteers as possible,” Anderson said, adding the more volunteers participate, “the easier it is on everybody.”
Several volunteers left the store when it was shut down during the pandemic lockdown.
Before taking the job as manager of Nu2U, Anderson worked as a store manager for decades.
Her latest job was a five-year stint at the Salvation Army’s national recycling operations division in Calgary.
Anderson saw the ad for the Nu2U job after she and her husband moved to the Olds area.
“I saw it advertised and I was like, ‘that sounds really interesting,’” Anderson said.
“I have never worked with an all-volunteer team before and I’m the type that likes to learn all the time.
“So I thought it would be a really great opportunity to learn how to work with an all-volunteer group because we had volunteers at the Salvation Army, but most of the employees were paid.”
Adair managed Nu2U for roughly seven-and-a-half years.
Aug. 31 was her last day on the job.
Adair, 64, said she would have liked to stay on the job until the end of the year. That would have marked eight full years.
But it just wasn’t the same after the COVID lockdown.
“The whole COVID thing just really changed how I felt about things,” Adair said.
“We had to, as you know, put in all these protocols and I lost some staff, some volunteers, and it just wasn’t the same after that.”
Adair said she and her volunteers had been a “really tight group.”
However, when they came back to the store, things were really different.
They had to limit the number of customers who could be in there at any one time.
Staff had to work behind plexiglass and/or wear masks and use hand sanitizer. Some were able to adapt; some couldn’t.
There was even a limit on how many could be in the staff room for lunch at any one time.
“It just seemed to change the atmosphere a bit,” Adair said.
“Like everybody coped; we still did well in the store, we still had record months and that.
But it just wasn’t the relaxing kind of atmosphere, I don’t think.”
Adair has lived in Olds most of her life.
After graduating from Olds High School, she studied recreation therapy at Mount Royal College.
However, for the vast majority of her working life, Adair sold furniture and real estate.
She and her husband Ray raised two children.
Adair says her job managing Nu2U was the best job she ever had.
“It was really, really rewarding,” she said.
She was pleased to see the store’s sales continue to rise and she enjoyed interacting with the volunteers and customers.
Occasionally those interactions with customers were especially rewarding.
“Sometimes they would find a real treasure and they’d share that with me – with us in the store,” Adair said.
“Like one lady found a pot, a cooking pot that was her gramma’s. She recognized that because it had a dent in the side.
“Another lady found a Christmas decoration that her one daughter had made for the other daughter.
“And now the daughter who would have received that was deceased, so it was really heart-warming for her to find this little memento, right?
“So just things like that; amazing things,” she said.
Last year, an old coin-operated game: Le Clown Bajazzo -- Bajazzo The Clown, was dropped off at the store.
Adair put out a public call for someone to help them get it working because staff figured out it needed German Marks in order to operate.
Eventually a young German man came into the store and bought it to hang in his shop.
“That was fun to share that with him because he actually was able to help me out about the history of it and read the instructions because he knew German and I sure didn’t.
“So just those contacts, right? It’s an awesome job,” Adair said.
“It just got to be too much for me. There should be a younger person in there. I guess I just tried to do too much.
“You do the social media and I got so I was doing the cleaning because we lost all those people.”
Ironically enough Ray has continued to volunteer at Nu2U.
“He started oh, maybe a couple of years ago,” Barb said.
“We were really like a team. I couldn’t have done it without him.”
She conceded it’s rather weird to be retired from the store and have Ray still working there.
“He said he’d give it a try and see what he thought,” Barb said. “Everybody asked why Ray would keep volunteering there. Well you know, there’s no reason why he can’t.”
Adair is currently spending her retirement practising piano.
“I took piano lessons as a kid,” she said, jokingly adding she might eventually write a thrift store song.
