Now Brewing! Starbucks Coffee Mid Valley!

Opening mid valley was a great experience. Everything kinda happened at once, so it was messy at times but thanks to my pre-opening team, we were able to open the store after 2 pre-opening days. I can still remember how good it felt to hear SW congratulating me for being able to open within 2 days. It became the new guideline for other new store opening after that – to open within 2 days! (That was when I first learned about the term market spoiler. Haha!).
We opened together with the Mid Valley Megamall and unfortunately, very few tenants did so. There were plenty of shop lots still under renovation so the mall wasn’t exactly swamped with shoppers. Just us partners! :)

As challenging as it was for business, the low period allowed me to focus on getting things right at the store. As mutually agreed, Uzir , Angie and I had many little discussions over which was the best way to do certain things. I think we might have talked things to death on a lot of matters. Haha….but it was all good, all good. I personally feel that we worked very well together. Well of course we did, Uzir and Angie was very enthusiastic at their jobs! Have you ever seen 2 Shift Supervisors fighting over who gets to complete paperwork? (Managing Productivity and Profitability to be exact!) Well I did!!!! One of them would complete it at the earliest opportunity and coyly slide it into my drawer, as though nothing happened. The other would walk in the next morning, open the drawer only to find that it has been completed. That’s when you’ll see the overjoyed face of the former screaming “Hah!! Too bad, I beat you to it!”. Believe me, all these positive energy in wanting to do their job, this, truly happened. It was a blessing to me, cos I was learning the ropes of being an Assistant Manager In-charge and they were always there, eager to help.

I started learning about P&L in depth; how all the figures are connected as well as how and where to trouble shoot when figures come out wrong. And they certainly did! EL would drop in now and then to check on my P&L progress so I dun get into trouble. But you know, no matter how much you’re taught, you still gotta experience it yourself to get the wholesome learning experience. So I had more P&L lessons from SW (read: he asked, I scrambled for answers!) and so bit by bit, I learned.

The low sales period drove us to venture ‘outside the box’ in order to get better figures for my P&L. I also needed more sales so I could schedule more partners on the floor. It wasn’t much fun for my partners when they have all these energy to pull shots and blend frappuccinos and yet I can’t give them the hours! So we did this thing……………………..and then that thing…………………….and then some more of this thing………….and we got more sales! Yay!!

Hmmmmm……….I never saw pouches get filled so much, so fast!!! ;)

And then December came, bringing with it the scare that was Y2K. I didn’t really care about it though. What got my attention was this grand new year’s party that was gonna happen at KL Plaza SW had told me we were getting involved in.

It wasn’t a big deal – only thousands of people, dozens of blenders and tons of ice. LOL!