The Clientele Is Warm and Fuzzy
After a long and stressful career as an advertising-agency production manager, Linda Jones never dreamed she'd look forward to being barked at by her clients. Now she lives for it. And for the camaraderie of their owners, who congregate daily in Jones's Three Dog Bakery in Collierville, Tenn., to chitchat and stock up on "pup tarts" and "snickerpoodles." "When I told my husband I wanted to do this, he thought menopause was eating my brain," says Jones, who retired from the ad business in 1998 and opened the store in 1999. "But I'd worked my whole life around people, and I enjoyed it. I wasn't ready to settle down with Oprah."
Not that she couldn't afford to. Jones, 57, didn't go into the gourmet doggie-treat business primarily to make money, although it's a nice side benefit. She did it to keep busy and stay connected to other people. "Seeing people everyday--that's really the best part of this," says Jones, who also has developed some warm and fuzzy (and lucrative) relationships with Collierville's canines. One former "coworker," a great dane named Scooby-Doo, was so popular that "people would call to find out if Scooby was 'working today' and come in just to see him, " says Jones. When Scooby died, his obituary ran on the front page of the Collierville paper.
Running the business is hard work--Jones puts in up to 60 hours a week, making a wide array of organic dog biscuits, working the floor, and monogramming bones (a killer during the Christmas season). "I don't feel retired in any way," she says. "I feel relieved that I figured out the next step of my life and that I get to come to work every day and be with people." She can't run the store alone. but jones accepts help only from "women of a certain age," as she puts it. in fact, she won't hire anyone under 50, which makes for an even greater social circle at work and confuses the life out of Collierville's job-hungry teenagers, "who usually just look at me with a dull stare when I tell them how old you have to be to work here," Jones says.
Her husband, Glenn, 67, also puts in his time at the bakery, where he is charged with making certain treats like "peanut-mutter cookies" and handling the Sunday shift. "He retired two years ago," jokes Jones. "He's waiting to retire again."
This story appears in the June 12, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
advertisement
