--- type: Article title: "Give the Best of You: When Family Pulls You Home" description: "With our youngest son's wedding this weekend, family is pulling everyone into one room — a reminder to give the best of you to the people who matter most." resource: https://amyfaychandler.com/give-the-best-of-you/ tags: [give-the-best-of-you] --- [The Human Edge](https://amyfaychandler.com/category/friday-retail-tidbits/the-human-edge/) | [Weekly Retail Tidbits](https://amyfaychandler.com/category/friday-retail-tidbits/) # Give the Best of You — Weekly Retail Tidbits #255 By[AmyFay Chandler](https://wordpress-1600709-6279960.cloudwaysapps.com) June 26, 2026July 31, 2026 ## Give the Best of You This weekend, the youngest of our three sons is getting married. Wedding weekends have a way of pulling those closest to us into one room. It’s had me reflecting on family this week, as my husband and I sew up the last details for the rehearsal dinner Friday night. I remember my mom passing along something her mother — my grandmother, Fay — taught her: “Give the best of you to your family and those closest to you.” It usually came at a pointed moment — when my four siblings and I were tired at the end of a long day and one of us did something that called for correction. Looking back, that lesson about giving your best almost always landed when we had the least of it left to give — which may be exactly why it stuck. The people we love most do deserve our best — not the leftovers, and not the part of us we just don’t feel like reining in, no matter how late or how tired we are. At work, the same is true. Customers are the easy case — of course they get our best. You try harder for them. You summon extra discipline to stay kind when something goes sideways, even when you’d like to blow your top. But what about your own team? Do you show up with your best each day — for one another, not just for the customer? Small-business retailers have a lot on your plate. I got curious about what actually helps a team thrive, so I had my AI team dig into the research for us:* “A leader’s mood is contagious — bring your best and the whole team rises with you; bring your worst, and everyone feels it.” 1. You set the emotional weather. “Only 1 in 3 workers strongly agree they got recognition or praise for good work in the past seven days — and the ones who feel unrecognized are twice as likely to quit within the year.” 2. Recognition is the cheapest tool you’ve got. “It takes more than a 20% raise to lure away an employee whose boss truly engages them — and almost nothing to poach one who feels ignored.” 3. Engaged people can’t be bought cheap. “Replacing one employee costs about a third of their annual salary by the time you count hiring and training.” 4. Turnover is the invoice you never see. “When researchers gave some Gap stores stable, predictable schedules — posted two weeks ahead, no on-call shifts — those stores’ sales rose about 7% and productivity about 5%.” 5. Predictable scheduling actually pays. The truth is, a leader can sit in any seat and hold any title. If your title actually implies leadership — how well are you leading? And if it doesn’t — do you still bring your best to the people who work beside you every day? Saturday night, the wedding party will have the head table — that’s tradition. But Friday, at the rehearsal dinner, a friend gave me advice I loved: honor the parents and grandparents. So Friday, the centerpiece of the room will be their table, with our bride and groom seated right at the head of it. My hope is that every one of them feels the love — and our best. And I hope your team feels your best every day — wherever you sit among them, and especially if you sit near the head. xoxo, ❤️ AmyFay Technology Tip — The People, Not the Tool The biggest story in tech this month isn’t about machines — it’s about people. The AI giants all have the same tools now; anyone can rent the best of it for about twenty dollars a month. So what are they spending billions fighting over? People. A couple of years back, Google paid around $2.7 billion to bring a single scientist back. One person — that’s what the right one is worth. (The one that made me smile: John Jumper, who won a Nobel Prize for teaching AI to crack a biology puzzle that stumped researchers for 50 years, just left Google for Anthropic — my favorite AI company. He also happens to be my brother-in-law’s cousin. Small world, big week.) And that’s your life too, isn’t it? You lie awake sure the shop across town carries your same lines — and sometimes they do, the same stuff, the same catalogs. But they don’t have your team, your eye, the store you built around all of it. The edge was never the tool. Everybody can order the stuff; nobody can order your build. So this week, don’t fr