Kysha Hair
Kysha Hair has worked for convenience stores for nearly a decade. Later this year, she’ll be running her own.
Hair graduated from Dublin High School in 2010, and started working at Biggs in Dublin. She stayed there for seven years. “I loved my customers,” she said. “I grew up in Dublin my entire life, and my mom worked at the school for 27 years, so I knew a lot of people that would come in.”
In 2016 Hair took a job at Olam, the peanut plant outside of Dublin. She stayed there for about six months, then found another job at Schreiber Foods in Stephenville where she worked for two years.
In 2018, she began looking for a new job and reached out to her former manager at Biggs, who had moved on to working as a manager at Allsups outside of Dublin. There weren’t many positions open, so Hair had to work overnight shifts for a while.
“I had a really bad night one night, and my manager came in and I said, ‘When you have an open spot for management, I want to move up,”' Hair said. “The next chance she had to move me up, I went from working overnights to training on days, and I got that down within just a couple of days. I guess they realized how fast I was moving along and how well I understood how that system runs and everything, because before I knew it, I was being offered my own store.”
The store Hair was offered is located in Cool, Texas, a small town between Mineral Wells and Weatherford, and it is still under construction. “The first time I ever saw it, it was just the foundation and pipes coming up through it,” Hair said. “Now I am due to get my keys to the store on October 11, and my open date is October 25.”
The store will be an Allsups Market, which means Hair will stock some grocery essentials in addition to the usual gas station fare.
Deciding to take on the store — which meant moving away from the Dublin area and leaving the house she lives in with her boyfriend — was not an easy decision for Hair. “We own our own house here in Stephenville so it was hard to give up a house where we don’t pay rent for somewhere else where we do pay rent,” she said.
Her boyfriend Jerrell Edwards was very supportive of her moving up in her career. “He was the one that gave me my push to do this, because I was so nervous,” she said.
Hair has been grateful to move up through the ranks of the convenience store business alongside her first ever manager, Vanessa. “She hired me at Biggs and was my manager at Allsups who gave me the promotion to store manager,” Hair said. “She has moved up, which has allowed me to move up, which is kind of cool. The first person who ever gave me a job is now helping me open my own store.”
Vanessa has served as an inspiration to Hair throughout her career. “I’ve watched her climb her way up, and I know if she can do it, I can do it,” Hair said.
In the future, Hair hopes to continue to move up. “The Allsups company is building stores like crazy,” she said. “There are five going up near Mineral Wells. If there’s an open spot for me to move up to district manager, I’m going to do that, and then regional manager. There’s room for growth and I plan to pursue that when the time comes.”
When she’s not working, Hair enjoys relaxing at home or taking trips to Fort Worth with her boyfriend Jerrell, who she met while working at Schreiber. The couple has been together for two years.
Hair’s parents, Sheila Hair and Randy Hair, still live in Dublin.
Hair’s advice to Dublin graduates is to strive for their goals. “Don’t give up,” she said. “It may take some time, but one day you will get there. And don’t ever compare yourself to anybody else because you’ll never be happy that way.”
Editor’s Note: This column chronicles what Dublin graduates have done since high school. If you have any suggestions for other grads, email pub!isher@dublincitizen. com.