He had nothing against retail in principle. Just Town Square. He despised its ethos of corner-cutting (the Potemkin approach to store maintenance—­cleaning stores only when upper-level visitors were expected—­was a case in point), its willingness to cheat employees in any way that was technically not illegal (and call it “performing its fiduciary duty to stockholders”), its arbitrary rules, such as its insistence that the unload take no more than an hour, regardless of the size of the truck and no matter how little difference it made to finish at 5:01 rather than 5:00. Corporate didn’t trust its own workers, was what it came down to—­the big shots thought that without a hard deadline, its employees wouldn’t work efficiently, which showed just how little corporate understood the people it employed. And then there was Meredith. More than any other executive manager Little Will had ever worked with, she seemed like the walking, talking embodiment of everything he disliked most about Town Square.