Times are changing, do we need to reinvent or go back to our roots? The answer is clear.

It’s been over 2 years since I was terminated from my sales job in the natural products industry, I think now is an excellent time to talk about it. Currently, a lot of people are being terminated and while for different reasons the underlying cause is the same. Wow! I think that’s the first time I have actually used that word, ‘terminated.’ That’s a harsh word, and it’s been much easier to use the words ‘laid off’ because it felt better and it makes it seem as though this wasn’t my fault. Ultimately, it was, probably not in the way that you think but I will get to that in a moment. I had worked with this company for almost three years. This was a long time coming. The natural products industry, like so many others, is changing. We have all seen this new trend over the last decade, and we know that the sales market for this particular industry is shrinking, big box stores and major internet stores wanted their piece of this massive industry and they took it. Brick and mortar stores are losing the sauce when it comes to sales dominance. Years ago, mom and pop independent stores carried this industry. People needed health products and they would head to their local natural store and pick the brain of the knowledgeable, yet unconventional, tree hugging hippy named “Jim” who had owned the store for years; friendships would ensue, and location and brand allegiance would be paramount. It just was.

I know it all too well, I got into this industry because it was what I knew growing up. After some personal health challenges, I knew that like most Americans I had picked the wrong major in college and while I did achieve a degree, I didn’t go on to law school as my young and brilliant mind had banked on. There wasn’t much I was going to do with that degree, and I stagnated. Eventually, I decided to go back to a trade school, of sorts, and become a nutritionist. It was 2004 and little did I know that simply being a nutritionist, no matter how much you knew, didn’t mean much. People don’t like to pay out of pocket, and if you aren’t a registered dietitian who just deals with calories in and calories out, and deciding that a patient eats too much sodium usually in a hospital setting, you aren’t going to find it an easy time to make any real type of living from being a nutritionist.

I was raised by a mother who was no fan of traditional medicine. Her mother, was a wonderful woman but she was a bit of a hypochondriac. If the organ could be removed and she could still survive, something was inevitably wrong with it, and it would be removed. This landed her in the hospital for much of my mother’s young life. She learned that doctors had a purpose, but knew that there were other, more sound ways to manage most of her health needs. After marrying my father in the 1960s and having three children, she raised us as holistically as she could. She was a stay-at-home mom and the absolute CEO of our little family. She cooked, and cleaned, and helped with homework, but most of all she kept us well. She was one of those visitors to one of those little health food stores and I remember it well as a child. As we walked in the door I still recall the whiff of what I can only describe now as bulk oats and nutritional yeast as it hit me upon entering. I would head straight to the tester bottle of acerola cherry vitamin C chews, while my mom would spend time discussing our needs with the owner. The guy was brilliant. He probably knew the Prescription For Nutritional Healing book like the back of his hand, and could help her with any needs she had.

When I was about 8 years old I can remember my mom became a distributor for a vitamin brand that sold MLM supplements. They had some really good formulas. Their multi-vitamin formula was a huge green softgel. I started taking handfuls of supplements and even drank protein shakes for breakfast. In the 1980s this was not the norm. Most kids had cartoon chewable vitamins and ate some rainbow colored cereals, but my mom knew better, and we were healthier for it. Other than ear infections, which were the plague of my childhood, I don’t recall going to the doctor that much when I was small. Overall we were quite healthy and mom knew how keep us that way.

When I had my own children I would return to this way of life and end up becoming a nutritionist. As I mentioned, it’s not an immediate fruitful adventure in entrepreneurship and I don’t have a marketing degree. I had my consulting business but it never really produced. So, after 8 years of being a stay-at-home mom myself, and me trying to make a go of it, we had built up quite a bit of debt and I knew after my second son was a couple of years old I needed to look for some part time work to help pay it down. Just around that time a staple health food store in my county was expanding into my neighborhood, and since I had been going to these stores my entire life, I figured it would be a good fit; I could make some money working and possibly network for my consulting business. I nailed a job as the Vitamin Manager and accidentally happened upon the natural products industry.

I immediately became popular among customers. I enjoy all things nutrition and as my mother before me, people would come in looking for answers to health challenges. The internet was still new to many age groups and for most of the older set it was just too daunting to try and find what they needed online, so they would come to me for help in the aisles. I enjoyed what I did, but the pay was horrible. Long hours in a cold store became mundane and redundant. I really enjoyed all of my returning customers but I needed more. After about two years at the store I got the opportunity to work for a vitamin broker who handled luxury brands in the industry and I was quickly dumped into outside sales. I worked with them and learned so much during those five years. Vitamin brands are amazing entities. Most major brands are extremely well read in the science and back up claims with sound and interesting information. I sucked it all in like a sponge.

After my time at the brokerage, I was given a new opportunity to work for a vitamin company as their Account Executive in my area. They are a high quality brand and again I learned so much, but all of us ‘in the industry’ had been seeing the writing on the wall for the better part of 5–6 years. Those people who previously feared the internet quickly found out that they could not only find most of their info online, but also could buy their supplements there too. Some unscrupulous companies would sell supplements at too deep of a discount online, and this hurt so many of the small health food stores throughout the nation. Companies do try their best to keep these practices at bay. They design policies and tracking for people who wanted to sell their brands and it worked to an extent but not always, and this hurt the little guy. The store I worked at a decade ago would make most of their money selling supplements during my time there are for years before me. The other parts of the grocery store had smaller margins and less interest. That would soon change.

In the US we have had a divergence in the last several years, we want to be healthy, or at least we strive to appear that way to our friends and family who we rarely see outside of social media. If we can get the camera angle and lighting just right we can give off an air of pure health and that is what we will do, damnit! So of course, around that same time as health became the new American way, where faux diets are aplenty and so many of us are in actual poor health, we have realized that the Standard American Diet just isn’t covering us any longer and it’s time for an overhaul. But time, though we have plenty to idly sit by and post online, time, is just fleeting apparently. We no longer have enough of it to visit hippy Jim like before. We just have enough to throw on our yoga pants and run on down to the local market to grab all of our needs en masse. Somehow spending $70 on a single bag of groceries is the new thing and well, we can keep up with the proverbial Jones’, so we do, even if it’s an illusion. Enter the big box stores…

About four years ago Amazon decided they needed to diversify. What better way to monopolize on the good people of the country but to make their lives more efficient by purchasing one of the biggest natural food stores and make it mechanized just like their website? I mean think about it, it was headed that way anyways. Years ago, Whole Foods hired hippy Jim when his little market failed, because of them. He helped to lead the charge by all means healthy to educate the Whole Foods crowd, and help them find their best health while he tried to make up for the losses. That guy wanted to help the people. I actually became ‘hippy Jane’ during my stent at the local mom and pop chain I worked for. We had no idea at the time that it would help lead to this change in the market. That eventually even Jim would not really be needed and a millennial would create an app to make him obsolete. Time and efficiency is what we yearn for, not human connection; that is the goal, however flawed. Supplement departments have been dwindling because people buy so much of those online and the food aisles have exploded. There are products for all kinds of specialized diets everywhere and as Americans change their mind on the validity of food choices almost weekly, there is always room for a new player to the health food game.

So back to my termination; Amazon buys Whole Foods and changes the game entirely. Signs go up welcoming Amazon Prime customers, and to apply for an Amazon Visa so you can use it while you shop at their store. Brilliant! You now get extra perks in Whole Foods. Yay! Right? In fact, unless you are a Prime Member you can’t even get the discounts once afforded to everyone who walked through the door, but hey it’s efficient, and that is what society craves. This almost forces the consumer to become a member, and guess who wins? Well the consumer gets all that time back and now almost anything we need ships for free to our doors in less than 48 hours. This is good, right? Really? Are you sure? I’m not, at least not any longer.

Whole Foods, under Amazon leadership, decided that they just didn’t make enough profit with the 50% margins they receive on supplement sales, and about three years ago made a huge announcement at a big trade show in Baltimore that sales representatives were no longer allowed to come into sell at the store level, and on top of that they would add a 5% merchandising fee to all of the orders; and that, my friends, killed our commissions. The Natural Products Industry was reeling. What would we do now? Whole Foods is a huge player in our market and how would we all survive? It wasn’t enough that rogue sellers on the internet were putting small health food stores out of business, how could we even work when our companies couldn’t pay our salaries? Eventually Whole Foods gave us a small break and pushed the changes back for a couple of months and that gave us a little sigh of relief, but ultimately I think we all knew what was coming. My company was no better at conveying information, they told us months before the mass terminations that they “were committed to a sales force” and basically strung us all along for 11 months. I mean in their defense we could have left and found work elsewhere during that time, but this new Whole Foods announcement decimated our industry. Many companies terminated contracts immediately, hastily, and decisively. So, we really had nowhere to go. I think many of us at our company thought we would be different, our company used integrity as part of their slogan, or so we thought. They were telling us they were committed to our sales force. Some other big brands took it on the chin and just adjusted and we figured our company would do the same. But they didn’t.

A new national sales manager was hired. We should have known something was up, the guy came from the consulting side and clearly had been part of other stirrups in the industry. He was quiet. Had been there a month or so and never formally introduced himself. No calls, no announcements, nothing. Not even our regional managers were told what was happening. We were all chatting among each other wondering if anyone had heard anything. Rumors were ripe with “yeah we are all safe,” especially those like myself who didn’t have very many Whole Foods stores on our account lists. I could take the hit on commission and still live quite comfortably. Other rumors toward the end started slipping out that we were done for, but it was hard to believe. They started loading the management and key account teams at our company, and becoming quite top heavy, the writing was on the wall. That should have been an indicator, but they were “dedicated to a sales force” how could they just up and get rid of all of us they had spent so much time and money educating? We had just launched major new products and they would need us to educate and get the word out, right? But that was never to be. A week prior to our termination they asked us to quickly fill out a calendar for the following two weeks. I personally thought it was odd since we all had to have our Outlook calendars filled out months in advance and all managers had access to them. Why did we need this new calendar? Something was up.

Whole Foods was having a 3-day sale in which they had us all work over the weekend to help in the aisles. Since our company was still paying commission from Whole Foods we all had to work the sale. We called to get permission to help Whole Foods and although they had that new rule of not allowing reps in the store, they did allow us to come in at certain stores during that sale, it was odd, but we did it. A co-worker and I were commenting to each other on how dead the sale was in both of our regions. It was told to us at the last minute that it was a Amazon Prime Sale and unlike any 3-day sales of yesteryear, if you weren’t a Prime member you didn’t get the 25% off. People didn’t seem too happy about that but what was there to do? The mechanized Amazon hand was guiding things, and if you wanted the discount you downloaded the app and paid the fee. That same co-worker said to me half joking, “I bet they are making us work the 3-day sale and then can us on Monday” — I laughed and while the thought was terrifying it couldn’t be because they were “committed to a sales force,” right? Wrong. That very next morning I was buzzed out of bed by the chime of my phone that I had an email. It read:
“Please be advised that you will have a call with Dan (the new director) and HR at 10:30 am”

Now that will throw anyone out of bed. Our team on the West Coast had a group text and almost as immediate as the email came, texts started buzzing, “did you get an email?” “What could this mean?” We all had calls lined up every thirty minutes for a few hours. Mine wasn’t first and certainly I would know what this meant sooner rather than later. I was driving with my son to a doctor’s appointment and had my husband drive so I could take the call. By the time it was my turn I had already heard the news that others had been fired. We found out that our regional manager had been demoted the Friday before. Now, his email to us that day that he was taking the rest of the afternoon off made sense. And as 10:30 am loomed I knew the inevitable was coming. The phone rang and I answered, in a chipper but serious voice. The call was quick and unfettered: “Hi Rana, this is Dan. I want to let you know that your position has been terminated effective today. You are leaving the company in good standing and if we have any openings in the future you are welcome to apply again. I will now hand you over to HR and she will explain the rest. Thanks.” And just like that, I was terminated. From a company that had told me, and I believed for three years, that they had the utmost integrity, I was terminated just that easily. Integrity suddenly meant very little. Though truth be told, I had known for 11 months that it probably wasn’t true and ultimately it’s just business. We were simply ‘the help.’ Expendable, needed for a time, and then not. Certainly not the family we had been told we were part of.

As I said earlier, this was my fault, that’s why I needed to come to the realization that ‘termination’ is a better word than being laid off. I personally had not done anything to be fired and I wasn’t, but I was terminated and it was partially of my own doing. You see, I was like hippy Jim. I spent years helping to form an industry that had no corporate skills, into the monster that it has become. The company I had last worked for had been an industry leader since the early 1970s. A family owned vitamin company that morphed from a people helper to just another brand. Those of us in the stores and people for decades before I got involved were educators. We wanted to see people well. We learned all we could so we could convey the message of health to others and in turn they could buy products that would help them be well. It was mutually beneficial, but the big players ate up the little guy. For years, small places would close their doors. Often other health food stores would revive in their place only to fail again as more and more big box stores closed in around them. Some would barely scratch by and “make it” but this was a changing industry. One which big players would come in an purchase these companies and completely change the game. Health was no longer paramount, it became all about the money. Ultimately we hastened our own demise. We let big business own the companies and we on the ground level knew it and continued to push for them, for us in the name of health, but for them in the pursuit of the almighty dollar.

In my industry we are, shall I say, impostors of the corporate world. Many in upper management stem from being hippy Jims and Janes who climbed that corporate ladder, who had no idea what they were doing. I can’t tell you how many regional managers and national sales managers came from the store level, and while they worked hard getting to the top, many of them have no real idea what a corporation is or how one runs. From brokers to CEOs, so many of them are so out of touch. Sure they have HR departments, and some semblance of a board of directors, but for the most part they are simply clueless when it comes to actual corporate culture and norms. This makes them all ripe for the picking when major conglomerates come around looking to buy the company and make millions on it. The Natural Products Industry, according to The Nutrition Business Journal in 2017, had its preliminary reports in as a $200 billion dollar industry. It’s a huge business and growing every single day. Americans want to be healthy, even the mass market is listening. Kellogg’s is now putting probiotics in their cereals. A decade ago most consumers had no idea what probiotics even were. Kombucha, that decades ago was made in the juice bars of mom and pop health food stores and fermented under the sink, is now a several million dollar a year business. They know consumers are getting smarter and want chemicals and preservatives out of the food supply, and that includes their supplements and cosmetics; and they want them all available for delivery or at the very least in the same single store. Time is apparently, of the essence.

But as for us, the old school hippy Jims and Janes who built this industry, we are being aced out. We know that we need to look to new ventures and start anew and that is where I landed. I made the mistake of designing a career of dignity and the endeavor to help people stay well and it made me really good money for a time. I won’t pretend that the industry and all of you consumers haven’t been good to me, but I knew I had to once again morph and re-invent. Which I certainly have done. I now work with independent retailers in the industry trying to help prop them up and renew what they had once been. I knew that it would take going back to my roots to make a difference. And with recent events we know that life is fleeting, take a moment to trust your local retailers, they are hurting more now than ever, and need our support. Gives the whole notion of ‘essential’ a whole new meaning.