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Donna Lane, manager at CVS, greets customers by name and lends an encouraging word. (Joanna King/jking@amnews.com / June 18, 2012) |
Donna Lane is the store manager of CVS Pharmacy in Danville where she has worked for 43 years.
She hopes to retire soon, but ...
“Every time I¿give my district manager a date, he talks me out of it,” she said. “He talks me into pushing it back just a little further.”
He has good reason.
Lane greets a customer by name and says, “I haven’t seen you in a while.”
The customer’s husband recently suffered a stroke, she tells Lane, and is now bedridden. She is his caregiver so doesn’t get out much anymore.
Lane takes her time with the woman. There is no one else in line to check out so Lane spends an easy and gentle moment with the woman.
“Bless your heart,” she says, as the conversation winds down.
“And don’t forget to take care of yourself, too.”
The woman thanks her and leaves with some things for her husband and some other things Lane gave her with a touch of her hand and a kind word.
One after the next, Lane knows every other customer who comes in by name, too.
“I have met a lot of people over the years, that’s for sure,” she said.
Lane was born and raised in Crab Orchard and has lived in Lincoln County near Hustonville for the past 20 years. She has a daughter who is married to a professor at Union College in Barbourville.
She goes to church as much as she can and said she changed her membership to Danville Church of God, where her sister attends, because of all the church did for them when their mother died.
“When I had my bout with cancer three years ago, the church was there for me,” she said.
She already had customer-service training from her three years working at a market in Junction City for the Coffman family when she made the move to what was then called the Super-X.
“I cried my eyes out after I got home that first day, because I’d only had the one other job and this was so different,” she said. “I swore I’d never go back.”
She did.
The store was later called Revco for a short time and finally CVS.
The original building was only a year old when she first came to work, but she outlasted that structure. It was torn down when the new store opened two years ago.
