Introduction:
How do I plan on making up for my lack of updates? Simple: post old content.
OK, not exactly. I actually worked pretty hard on this piece six months back. It’s a 3,000-word summation of a nearly six-year long grocery career — first job, workplace romance, dealing with the monotony of completing the same tasks over and over, all that jazz. It’s also never seen the light of day. Why, you ask?
If I’m being honest, it’s built around kind of a gimmicky structure (I don’t think the time component is necessary) and I’m not sure if the entire story adds up to much. But I think there are some great individual moments that could be fashioned into something good… maybe, maybe not. After all, some pieces of writing are only destined to remind your blog’s readers that you still have a pulse… Any kind of critiques are welcome.
Pyramid scheme: produce-stacker chronicles
More often than not, for more than half a decade, my work schedule read “11-8.” Three to four shifts a week. So many “11-8”s I should get it inked onto my arm to remind me of the X hours I spent bagging, manning a cash register and stacking produce. If I could condense five years of “11-8”s into one day, one monotonous, occasionally funny, stressful, slightly exciting, so-tired-of-customer-service-I-want-to-yell-and-become-a-hermit day, this is what it would look like. Each hour represents roughly half a year.
11:00 – 12:00
11:00: Like any new employee looking to make a good impression, I begin my day at 11 o’clock on the button. As the years progress, I would begin to interpret my start time and uniform more loosely. Often hoping my managers don’t notice I’m hung-over, five minutes late and wearing different colored socks as I sneak in on a Saturday morning. But at this moment, I’m the face of clean-cut and dependable baggers everywhere.
11:10: An awkward 17 year old prone to anxiety, bagging is kind of scary for me at first. Since this is only my second time flirting with employment, I constantly worry about getting fired for accidentally bag someone’s meat and cleaning products together. With the help of checkers, slowly I become more comfortable. Eventually the limits and conventions of bagging physics fall by the wayside. I efficiently arrange cans and boxes in one bag, fitting smaller items like candy bars into spaces unseen by others. I am Neo. I see The Matrix.
11:15: Advantage of mastering bagging? I’m adored by checkers who openly compete with each other for my skills. Disadvantage of my prowess? With no challenges, no mountains in front of me to climb, shoveling consumer products into paper or plastic gets old fast. Time stretches on, I can no longer tune out the beeping of the check-stand. This begins to take a toll on my well-being. When I’m outside of the store on my break, my sister calls and neglects to tell me she is using self-checkout at another grocery store. Hearing the incessant beeping, I’m pretty sure insanity is setting in.
11:30: A star bagger, I’m on the short list for a promotion to produce. My only real competition is a few kids I go to school with. Fortunately for me they care more about smoking weed and drifting their expensive cars than doing any real, actual work. Being uncool with a limited social life has its perks.
11:44: I get the promotion! More pay and more responsibilities. Chief among them is a commitment to focus on customer service. Whenever a shopper is within ten feet of me, I have to run through an airtight checklist of pleasantries. Failure to miss even one thing on the checklist when a secret shopper rolls through - whether it be greeting, asking if the customer is finding everything OK, offering to take them to an item, sampling, offering a selling suggestion and capping everything off with a friendly goodbye - is considered an absolute failure punishable by getting chewed out by at least eight corporate bosses (a’ la Office Space).
I understand the importance of customer service, especially in the Yelp.com era, but saying rehearsed lines so man y times makes interactions robotic, paradoxically preventing me from “knowing the customer.” The pressure to deliver customer service even elicits unconscious reactions Pavlov would be proud of. Whenever I walk into the store on my days off I can’t help but say “hi” to confused customers. I also rearrange produce if I see it’s in a state of disarray.
Still, I’m grateful for the promotion. To prove it, I work really hard, tearing up and down the department, my view obstructed by boxes of various fruits and vegetables piled higher than my eye line.
12:00-1:00
12:15: The store seemed liked an efficient, well-oiled machine when I first began work. Maybe because I was so nervous and eager to impress people. Slowly I’m starting to notice cracks in the veneer. People aren’t as confident or productive as I originally thought. I come to the conclusion workers need distractions or ways to escape to cope with customer service. For example, to forget his time at Vons, one of my co-workers is fond of taking on various acting roles. Today he’s Bruno, from the movie of the same name starring Sacha Baron Cohen, greeting customers with an enthusiastic “ACH-YA” and “HI GUYS.” I’m thinking about sending some clips of his work I’ve recorded with my cell phone to The Academy come award season.
12:30: My way of escaping? Flirting with cute baggers. My 12:30 p.m. self is much cooler than my 11 a.m. self. I’ve taken up surfing and am capable of caring on a conversation with a female without my knees shaking violently; nonetheless, my nerdy tendencies usually shine through. Think Jesse Eisenberg meets Spicolli. Set a precedent that continues for the next three hours: fishing solely off the company pier.
1:00-2:00
1:30: To confirm I’ve picked a ripe cantaloupe, housewives interrogate me with a highly developed bullshit detector normally reserved for their children. By the end of the torture session, I can only stammer “y-y-y-esss it’s good, I sw-sw-swear!”
Sometimes housewives send their husbands to do their bidding. Their significant others can be high strung, but these interactions are generally pretty pleasant – I do have to remember not to laugh at questions like “why don’t you have more of beer selection in produce?”
And not to sound like an elitist sitting atop a pyramid of peaches, because honestly, if I didn’t work in the produce department, there’s a high likelihood I would be just as loveably clueless.
1:57 The theatrics aren’t limited to the inside of the store. In the parking lot, senior citizens throw caution to the wind when backing up their cars. Checking mirrors and turning around to make sure nothing is behind them is a mere formality that’s normally disregarded. There’s no official data on this, but in my experience we’ve lost a lot of good baggers to oversized Cadillacs.
2:00-3:00
2:45 - 15 minutes to lunch, I see her. She works in the floral department. Tall and skinny with fluttering brown hair, she’s mostly hidden behind a fortress of plants and flowers. I watch her arrange a bouquet made of roses as I arrange the base of a soon-to-be pyramid of oranges. Older men buying flowers for their wives make passes at her. I later learn floral girl is into books and her name is a color. I’m smitten. We occasionally talk, trading increasingly long glances from across our adjacent departments.
I have a bad habit of zoning while meticulously laying pieces of produce on one another. I’m generally oblivious to the dreamy smile that spreads across my face while images of Ninja Turtles and Bob Barker stream through my head – that is until she disarmingly tells me I should “stop smiling at my apples” from her plant-encased compound. To return her flirtations, I leave fake customer complaint cards from the love-stricken, mature men who favor orbiting her department over spending time with their wives. A typical faux complaint reads along the lines of “I left the retirement home to talk to that young girl in floral, but my oxygen tank was on the fritz and she wouldn’t help me grab another one, plus she didn’t recognize the Mash reference I dropped — for shame Vons.”
Don’t underestimate the power of customer complaint cards — send enough and someone will actually take notice. Flower girl and I are dating. Are love like ummm, a rose, blossoms. Forgive me for the bad metaphor, but at this point, flowers and the girl who arranges them in pretty fashion are all I have on the brain.
3:00-4:00
3:00 – Lunch time. I grab food, hop in my car and try forget the busy store and all the individual parts that compose it. The carts weaving through each other. People trying to weigh their children with the produce scales. The old, nearly blind hijacking the store rascal and bumping into displays and people (no hostages were taken).
I can normally block out these unholy thoughts, yet my brain can’t stop mulling over one thing: she’s gone. Except in reality, she’s not. She still works right next to me.
3:30 In the span that it took for apple season to rise and wane — seven short months for those produce enthusiasts out there keeping score — flower girl and I’s relationship reaches its conclusion. In or out of the store, I can’t stop reflecting at what went wrong. People try and stay busy at work to forget such things. I don’t have that luxury. Just when I’ve successfully distracted myself for long enough to momentarily forget her, she walks through my department holding a plant, and once again, my brain slips into a well-worn groove of memories past. Regret ever going near the damned company pier.
4:00-5:00
4:00 Peaches go out of season. Flower girl and I decide our story has an epilogue. Pears and oranges replace peaches on produce displays as fall Santa Ana winds blow through the entrance of the store and breathe life back into our relationship. Flower girl and I’s second split coincides with the crop of pears waning — only to find ourselves back together again with the rise of spring strawberries. Season after season, crop to crop, as the produce cart turns and turns a million times over, the cycle seemed doomed to repeat itself forever. Until one day, the spell of workplace romance fades. She quits at the end of peach season and I’m left wondering what I saw in her in the first place. Perhaps flowers have some kind of seductive, magnetic quality that entices men, not women. That would explain why so many older men constantly hovered around her. Or possibly senility?
5:00-6:00
5:30 – With so much money changing hands at as many as nine registers, as far as currency, cash and credit are king. But like cigarettes in prison, there’s a commonly agreed upon means of bartering at grocery stores — I’m talking, of course, about the seedy underworld world of pens.
No matter how many pens are in the store, there never seem to be enough for the average worker. Customers steal them. Managers hoard them in secret stashes. Bring your own pens in — doesn’t matter. Same result.
Somehow the remaining pens flow directly upward to management or out to customers. Meanwhile I’m stuck inquiring as to the whereabouts of a pen while 10 people impatiently wait in line because a senior citizen writing a check has never felt the cold surface of a debit card in their wrinkly hands. Debates abound as to the best course of action for making pens more plentiful. In hopes of increasing productivity and spurring growth, some favor artificially stimulating the pen supply by flooding the sales floor with store-bought pens. Others say this would make workers too dependent on the company, creating a daily expectation of ink-filled handouts.
Being such a commodity, temporarily lending out one pen to a fellow employee equals approximately one huge, gigantic favor redeemable by the lender at any point in time — said favor generally involves covering for the lendee because they’re too hung-over to adequately to wave the barcode of an given item in front of a checkout scanner.
5:45 Speaking of things that are hard to come by, there are never enough baggers these days. Why are baggers the first thing to go when the economy gets rough? When I’m checking and a million items are at the end of the conveyor belt, some nice customers in line tell their kids to help me. I tell them “you should leave them here and have them bag for me all night — our corporate offices don’t mind child labor.” I’m joking. Sort of.
6:00-7:00
6:00 After three years working at Vons one thing is becoming increasingly clear: The more time an employee has logged at Vons, the more likely he or she is going to be mentally unglued. A question often rattles in my head: Are the crazy drawn to grocery stores or does working at a grocery store breed crazy? Figuring this is a somewhat of a “chicken and egg” issue, I found of our dairy guys hoping he had an answer. Puffs of air floated from his mouth as he answered in the freezing milk cooler “this place definitely does something to you - it’s for sure knocked some screws loose in my head”
The majority of employees seem to begin their tenure as well-adjusted individuals. But an avocado can only spend so many days under harsh, fluorescent-store lighting affects it — how is the brain different?
Case in point, there’s the guy I mentioned at 2 o’clock who likes to take on character roles. He’s still sharp, but add on three years to an already long career at the grocery store, and he’s become even more detached from reality — his antics more daring. Tired of playing characters from famous movies, his routine now includes treating every customer over forty as if they were one of my parents. Middle aged and elderly customers are greeted with “Hello Mrs. Whitlock. Yeah how’s Jared?” – sometimes adding “how’s his dancing in Hillcrest going?” with a straight face. Oddly enough, no one ever calls him on this.
Three years deep with at least two more until I finish college, prison bars are materializing where they weren’t before — especially given the state of the economy. I feel as though my world is overlapping with the Shawshank Redemption. Unable to make it outside the world of grocery, an older grocery clerk approaching retirement age etches his name into a wooden slat and hanging above my department’s double doors with a box cutter and says goodbye to a world full of mismatched price tags and secret shoppers. One bold employee occasionally sneaks a CD player into the backroom, offering workers a brief glimpse of freedom beyond the confines of middle-age friendly soft rock. He got two weeks alone in the dairy freezer for that stunt. I dream of meeting an ex-coworker who escaped the grocery store in Mexico (pending me finding a note from him under a rock at the base of a oak tree). I hope the Pacific is as blue as it in my dreams.
6:45: OK, being cynical is easy, but there are a lot of customers who are genuinely nice and make my day that much better. Whether they can relate to the plight of the working man because they once or are currently working in a customer service – or are just inherently nice, I can’t say.
When I first started working at the store, a man in line at checkout supplied a new checker with the code for Kiwis. He confessed that he worked at a grocery store 10 years ago, and yet he still remembers all of the produce codes. Those codes have been repeatedly hammered into my brain — I’ll probably be in the same boat once I leave the store. Maybe I’ll dish out some code that’s been stored in the depths of my mind to a confused checker 10 years down the line. More than four-digit codes, hopefully I’ll remember to always treat those on the frontlines of customer service with respect – giving workers an understanding nod because the guy in front of me is personally holding them responsible for the fruit he purchased, never mind that they’ve never held a plow or been to a farm. Then again, maybe I won’t ever get that chance. Maybe I’m bound to wear a produce apron for the rest of my life — an infinite number of 11-8’s penciled into my future.
7:00-8:00
7:55 – Now a college graduate, I told the grocery store I’m quitting to travel to Europe for three months. It’s either the bravest or craziest thing I’ve ever done considering I don’t have a job lined up for when I get back. During a severe economic downturn. With a degree in Journalism.
For years I’ve planned on releasing all of the pent-up customer service frustration during my last two weeks by going out in style. One fantasy entails wearing pajamas to work, curling up in the small space underneath one of the produce tables, closing the door and emerging periodically to trick customers into thinking I slept underneath there. Then again, I practically never leave the store, so I’m pretty sure most customers would be unfazed by my PJ’s.
Others are less elaborate. Giving everyone a piece of my mind. Tackling a customer (preferably a senior citizen paying by check). Driving the cart reserved for handicap people, a 40 in hand, drifting around the aisles like a G. Swear words over the intercom. Unleashing the hot lead of a shotgun into newly built pyramid of apples. RAWR!
…Except none of that happens. More than five years of performing customer service has made me subservient, unable to act out and stand up to customers. I’ve effectively been neutered; I’m a shell of a man.
7:59
Either I’m a shell of a man, or something else has happened.
A job, at its most basic level, is a series of repetitive tasks – pushing a produce cart, swiping items through a scanner. On paper, that’s true, and if even that’s all companies intend for it to be, interesting people and experiences come along, coloring those 11-8’s. So much so that those colors seep outside the 11-8 experience, hardening and forming an impression that will be there well after leaving a job. For better or for worse, life’s picture is partly painted by the workplace.
As much as I want to tackle customers and be the voice of disgruntled employees everywhere, more than anything, I’m grateful to have met so many great people. I can only thank them for providing much needed relief and overseeing my journey from boy to man – well boy-like man – after all, I still have a baby face (checkers who know I’m over 21 still have to fight the urge to card me).
And even though I - like any employee who has worked somewhere for a significant period — have a laundry list of complaints about management, the grocery store gave me a job in uncertain times and provided structure in this oh-so-critical stretch of my life. If I’m handing out gratitude, I also give thanks to the store for paying me enough to get through college.
Beyond financial health, as much as I grumble about mundane tasks and angry people, the job imbued me with real-life experience. Providing for emotionally stunted adults, patiently hearing complaint after complaint, dealing with the awkwardness of a workplace romance gone sour (more than a few times) — tell me this job didn’t prepare me for future 9-5’s, 10-7’s, or whatever hours I work down the road.
