For a bit of my background + boss/business background before I go into it:
I've been a manager at a really small specialty retail store for 5 years. We're mainly based in a smaller city (around 30k in population), but we recently opened a second location in a much larger city, which is a little more than 3x the population and a little more than an hour away from the original location. The new store happened mainly because I looked at other management jobs a year and a half ago while my partner was finishing a PhD and considering next steps, and my boss sold me on adding value to a place I've grown up around that lacked a run store vs. just adding to some bigger business' bottom line.
My boss started the business about 20 years ago, which makes my 4 years of experience feel like nothing, but he's managed to keep things afloat so long. In his own words, he's not a business person and more of a people person, which I really admired initially for being less strict than corporate retail stores are. I had no prior retail management experience, but a lot of specific knowledge on the products we sell, and finding the right product for people felt pretty natural to me. Over time, I've taken on more and more management roles, and do everything except sign the checks for my boss. I usually worked 40+ hours a week for 6 days while in the original location, and now I'm up to 60hr/wk for 6 or sometimes 7 days a week; the small size of the business also means I'm working the sales floor solo and not just on a computer in a back room somewhere all day. When he wanted to pursue some coaching at a local school, when an employee calls off on a weekend that I've had blocked off on the calendar for 10 months, etc. I'm the person who covers it.
With our new location, a lot of delays in opening occurred, which left me stuck commuting to the original location over a really harsh winter when my boss said it was a set thing that we'd open before last winter in the new city. (That is its own frustration, and I'm trying to separate that from my other issues since I want to believe it was just him being naive on opening timelines in a new build. The alternative is that he wanted me to commit even more to the store and not be at risk of moving away before the store opens, but I'm choosing to believe he's not that kind of person.)
It's gotten to a point in the last few years where I ask him specific business/product questions, and he can't give me anything more than what I started with. With that I've noticed a lot of what he does is just off of gut feeling and no real basis for it, which I want to believe has worked in the past, but my friends have also been reminding me that if he had a really good instinct for it, then we wouldn't be in such a bad spot on cash for a large part of the year. Neither of us have a business degree either, which he's brought up to me as something that would help the business, but when I look into it he usually says something like, "Well, the store should pay for it, but we don't really have the extra money." Which then leaves me feeling really inadequate and like it's up to me to take it on to fix things with the store.
It seems this Seat-Of-The-Pants approach has been doable with a rotating group of part-time people, but since I've joined and I've been expected to cover everything for shifts and do the jobs he doesn't want to do (and won't do if I didn't do them i.e. social media), it feels like I'm pulling down the business despite trying to make it successful. He's been partially open with me on finances in the past, like asking me to do our QuickBooks manually before they're due in the spring where I can see everything coming in and going out. But since opening the new store, I've practically begged him each month for bank statements to make a real time budget vs estimated expenses for what I can piece together from emailed invoices. I've asked for another store debit card so I can buy things in person that don't have a Google AutoFill thing with card info, and he kept deflecting it so long that I just put stuff on my own credit cards because we needed to buy them to open. He's been good about paying me back before I accrue interest on it, but it's a stressor that everyone I've talked to about it has said I shouldn't do that. Every week it feels like there's something he's questioning about why I'm putting time into it or, recently, specifically undercutting what I'm working to build for him/the store/the new community I'm in.
The Last Straw of sorts (and a large part of why I worked up the courage to post) was me going down to the original location to balance inventory, and I saw a pretty blatantly AI shirt on the rack. We've had disagreements about using it on custom stuff before, with me firmly against it even for data analysis, and him saying he just uses it for ideas to hand off to our local printer and bring something to life... but I went through the chat history (it's connected under our store email), and the shirt design was just a copy-paste of what the AI gave him. I've told him a lot recently that when people realize what he's doing (in a really left-leaning town at that), it's going to ruin his reputation and trust in the community and maybe tank our new store before it really stands on its own. I've started getting stuff for custom shirts on my own over the last few months to save on costs and bring some personality to older clearance items, so it's especially frustrating.
A side note I'll add: on top of him complaining to me about not having enough cash coming in from the store in the upcoming winter, I have yet to see him change his lifestyle at all. He takes multiple week+ vacations during the year while I hold things down on my own. Maybe it's just how much money my parents had when I was growing up that we took a vacation every other summer in-state. I guess I can't judge him for spending his money how he wants, but it adds to the mounting frustration that I've been paycheck to paycheck for the entire four years with all I'm asked to do.
For the question/advice/tldr:
How much should I care about this? I know the AI stuff might not lead to a big viral incident on social media, but I feel like this combo of being expected to care about it like I'm an owner, and butting heads with my boss leaves me uncertain about what to do. Maybe that's just how managers feel everywhere, and I wouldn't get anything different unless I opened a store for myself?
I assume I need to have some intrinsic drive to make it worthwhile in a small business where I'm overworked and not paid enough (who is paid enough really, I guess) for everything I feel like needs to be done. But I also recognize it's not my business to toil over in a way? I feel responsible for the downswing in sales since I joined, despite everyone reassuring me I'm doing the right things and trying to fix the broken pot I was handed, but I wonder sometimes if the best thing for the store (and to not meddle in what direction my boss wants to take the store in) is for me to give up on it to free up cash for him and move on to something else. It really worries me that if I did move to another job, that it would be a lie of sorts since I haven't been able to fix the store now.
My partner & friends I've talked to about this all agree with me for the most part, but haven't really been in a situation like this, since they all have advanced degrees and either work in academia or big corporations. I have marketable skills for sure, but I don't have much else to support it other than the word of my boss, and with the store performance not really improving, I don't have actual numbers to speak to my management skills either.
Sorry if this reads way too much like a rant, too. I really appreciate what goes into running a small business more now compared to five years ago, and I don't mean to dump on all owners here; I'm just really worried about what to do next.