The coporate lateral ladder.

I'm having a lot of frustration at work recently. The holidays are coming up, and it's the perfect opportunity to get my sales back up to where the should be, as opposed to where they have been while there was no one in my position taking care of everything.

I have a store manager who is complaining about bad comps (how the sales are doing in comparison to last year's sales at the same time), but who doesn't allow a lot of displays throughout the store. He doesn't like nice wooden display fixtures that match all the shelves throughout the store, but he allows product still in the boxes to be stacked upon one another, with the cardboard cut open. Some of them are actually on the floor. Not the sales floor, I mean the actual literal floor.

He gave me one place to do some cross-promotion. There was olive oil there, but he said grocery would take it out. A week ago. I had to do it myself today.

While doing that, I was stopped by someone in the bakery department, where the display would be, and was told that I couldn't put my coffee there because he needed it for his product.

So I'm stuck now.

You know, I've been making a huge effort to get displays up, to keep the shelves full, and to talk about the product as much as possible to get the sales back up. But it's not enough because the people who want sales up are blocking everything I do. When I was hired for the job, I was told one of the reasons was my creativity. But I can't exactly let that shine, can I? If I'm not allowed to do my job?

If I make an effort, and sales suffer because of a higher-up's trite standards, I can't blame myself for it. But I applied for the job because I wanted to do it, and if I'm not allowed to do it, it's torture.

It would be different if I were given the opportunity to do all of this stuff, and sales were still bad. But I'm not getting the opportunity.

So luckily I have the next few days off to cool down and think about what I'm going to do. What loopholes do I have?

I do have one thing. It's a piece of advice I was given by the man that pretty much gave me the job, and it's what I'm going to leave you with tonight.

It's easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.