Going cruising with employees

APPOMATTOX — Good thing Lisa Slayton isn’t a corporate CEO. She’d be drummed out of the club.

Slayton’s business is doing well after five years, despite the economic downturn, yet she hasn’t taken steps to sell it to a larger company and turn a quick profit. Nor has she laid off any employees to cut costs or paid herself a bonus.

Instead, the owner and manager of Hometown Drugs in Appomattox decided to take two of her full-time employees on a cruise as a reward. That happened last month, although only one of the two was able to go.

“When she first told me about this,” said Shirley Walker, who did take the Carnival Cruise Lines trip to the Bahamas, Grand Turk, Half Moon Key and the Bahamas, “I said, ‘C’mon, stop kidding me. That’s mean.’”

Slayton has other employees now, but Walker and Linda Short were the ones who came to work for her when she started her store in 2004.

“God has blessed us to where we are,” Slayton said, “but we wouldn’t be there if it hadn’t been for these people working with us every day for a year and a half. Since we had survived as a business to celebrate this anniversary, I was thinking of ways to thank them and came up with the cruise idea.”

With some companies, Walker and Short would have been the first to be laid off because of their seniority.

“We put in a lot of hours in those early days,” Walker said, “but it was worth it. It was fun, really, because we were starting something new.”

In a small town like Appomattox, pharmacists can be like hair dressers — customers have their favorites. Slayton, Walker and Short all moved over from different local drugstores, each with their own following, sort of like an expansion baseball team drawing from the rosters of existing teams.

“There are other pharmacies in town,” Slayton said, “but I felt like there was room for one more. This area is really growing.”

A graduate of James Madison University and pharmacy school at Virginia Tech, Slayton didn’t mind working for one of those other stores, but she had some ideas of her own that she wanted to try out.

Her pharmacy, located in a strip mall on the edge of Appomattox, is far from what chain stores like CVS and Walgreens have become. Except for a couple of shelves of disjointed household items, all you’ll find are pharmaceuticals. On the walls are blown-up photographs of the Slayton kids playing sports.

“I wanted to keep things basic,” Slayton said.

The period of 80-hour weeks is over, thankfully for all concerned. Besides a small core of full-time employees, Slayton brings in a couple of part-time pharmacists from other places to fill her slot when she’s off.

She was originally supposed to co-own the new business with another pharmacist. Things changed on his end, however, and she was forced to go it alone. Husband Keith, with a full-time job of his own, was limited to offering moral support.

“It took awhile,” Lisa Slayton said, “but we’re starting to get an identity and a following. “We’re making it.”

But not enough to pay for a Caribbean cruise for Slayton and her family and the two employees and their families.

“Fortunately, I had a longtime friend who agreed to lend me the money,” Slayton said.

Shirley Walker had surgery just a couple of weeks before the trip, but said: “I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.” Shortly after they returned, her husband had a heart attack and was hospitalized.

“Linda had a conflict and couldn’t go,” Slayton said, “but we had booked the trip and were locked into those dates. I plan to show my appreciation for her in some other way.”

The best part for Shirley Walker, she said, “was having that week where I didn’t have to cook and clean. Somebody did it for me, and it was just wonderful.”

Now, Lisa Slayton is already looking ahead to the store’s 10th anniversary.

“We’ll have to do something special then, too,” she said.