Workin' Man - Part XXVI - The End of Retail

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 I had survived, barely, six months of excruciating uncertainty, but it wasn't the only problem, however. Tim, the assistant store director, had applied for an ASD position and was moving to the Super Saver at 48th & O. Right around the holidays. If I remember correctly I was able to keep him for Thanksgiving, but he would be gone by Christmas. I had to hire and train a new ASD. Right around this time Susie's doctor found a tumor in her eye and had to have surgery to remove it. While she was in Iowa City recovering from surgery I had to drive back to Lincoln to conduct interviews. I don't recall who was handling HR duties at the time, but I had that person set up interviews, one after the other, on Saturday. I believe I interviewed eight or nine candidates. Like HR Coordinators, Assistant Store Director openings usually attracted people with little to no qualifications for the job, mainly because no one really knew what they did. Of all the people I interviewed I considered two to be qualified. One was Todd, my Night Manager, but he declined after I offered him the position (why do people do that?). My second choice was Jamie, who had been the assistant grocery manager when I was at Pine Lake. 

Jamie was very rough around the edges. There had been several complaints about him from other employees, but Nick, our old store director, and I always tried to see beyond the gruff exterior -- he was a misfit, just like the rest of my crew! But I remembered how Jamie was able to at Pine Lake motivate the grocery clerks, who are typically the laziest bunch of anyone in any store. How I could always count on him to follow through on assignments and come up with out-of-the-box solutions to problems. Since the position would combine that of grocery manager, I thought, given his grocery experience, that he'd be ideal. I sold the idea of promoting Jamie to my supervisor, District Manager Scott Ruth, who was on board, but when I checked with corporate HR about what pay rate he could be offered, they reacted as if I was planning on hiring Satan...or Pete Hegseth. Ah yes...Jamie had the HR target on his back. Around the same time the assistant store director at 66th & O Russ's had quit suddenly -- remember, we're right around the holidays. Tim (not my former ASD, but the Tim who turned down my offer the previous year to be Front End Manager/Human Resources Coordinator) was helping out and somehow impressed Scott Ruth, who recommended to me that we bring him on board as ASD, which we soon did. The problem was that Tim has absolutely no experience in grocery. We sent him out to a few other stores to get trained by experienced grocery managers and ASDs, but he was still pretty green going into Christmas week. Looks like it's time for another Pat Raybould story.

It was probably about a week before Christmas, on a Sunday. I had decided that after working with Tim in the morning I would turn him loose to manage the store solo for the first time that the afternoon. I gave him a to-do list, which included restocking the Christmas candy display. About 30 minutes after I left, Pat showed up. Without checking in with Tim he found a pallet of Christmas candy in the back room and brought it out to the holiday aisle. He then spent some time berating Tim for the display not being full. Then he began the great fruitcake fruit hunt. For those who don't make their own fruitcake, grocery stores stock the dried cherries, pineapple, apricots and citron ( nobody really knows what citron is, but we carried it anyway), but they hardly sell any. You usually can find a stack of it marked down in January. If you sold out you considered yourself lucky and didn't try to procure any more. Pat wandered over to the Christmas baking display and noticed that there was no fruitcake fruit. He started asking employees where the fruitcake fruit was. Of course since none of them, like meat cutters, produce clerks and floral department employees, had anything to do with stocking these items, not to mention the fact that we were out, no one could tell Pat where the fruitcake fruit was. Tim tried to tell him that we were out. Pat couldn't believe that was true and embarked on a quest through the back room to find the fruitcake fruit. Of course he didn't find any, because we were out, and happy about it. The next day he called Scott Ruth and told him to tell me to get more fruitcake fruit in the store. I got some from one of the other stores and didn't sell even one unit and had to mark them all down after Christmas. 

At some point during the year Tim was transferred to another store and Bill, an experienced ASD came to my store. I was also given permission to hire a grocery manager. For once I thought that the corporate executives actually wanted the store to succeed. I was wrong. There were a lot of hints that the store was going to close. The barely functioning air conditioning unit that required a sprinkler on the roof to keep it cool, the stinky drain that should have been dug up and repaired, the department managers who were being transferred out one at a time. But it was all confirmed one evening when an email that was only supposed to go to the executive committee went out to all store directors and assistant store directors. It clearly stated that the store was closing soon and a date needed to be set. News travels fast. Scott Ruth came out to our store and met with all the managers and lied to them, that the store wasn't closing. Bill and I kept our mouths shut. 

At some point I got another visit that didn't bode well. Tom Schulte, Operations VP, was accompanied by Donna, the corporate HR Director. They had with them a pile of printouts from my Facebook page. I had made a comment that they didn't think was appropriate, and others had made further comments that they didn't like. Someone from B&R had seen these comments and reported me to corporate. A friend had brought up how many customers acted terribly to service sector employees and I responded with something about abusive customers. I was written up again, and had to attend counseling sessions through our employee assistance program. This is when I realized how much of a target I had on my back and how closely my actions were being scrutinized. At my counseling sessions the counselor brought up incidents from years in the past that I thought had been resolved and forgotten. I was on thin ice with B&R.

The incident that I am sure was the one where they decided I would be fired came in the Autumn of the year. Two customers, friends of one of my managers, wanted to getting married in the store. This was something that I always thought would be cool -- the store director officiating a wedding in the grocery store! They ended up buying their flowers and wedding cake at the store, as well as a lunch for them and their witnesses. Melissa, who was in charge of promoting store events on our internal social media site, took photos and posted them. Soon after I received a call from Donna telling me to take down the photos of the wedding. She claimed that she had received complaints from several of my peers and at least one store employee. The complaints were supposedly that I was doing personal business on store time, but in reality they were about the fact that it was two women getting married. This was confirmed for me when Donna mentioned that the internal employee called the wedding an abomination. I took the photos down, but once again, a meeting that involved Donna took place. I was criticized for doing the wedding on my 15-minute break, but Donna maintained that since I still had my nametag on, I was working. I was criticized for leaving 30 minutes early at the end of the day since I did not take a lunch break. Donna maintained that since I was in the Deli area I had taken my lunch break. (Which is it Donna? Was I on the clock or on my lunch?). I was written up again, although for some reason it was worded as an extension of my previous Performance Improvement Plan. I was told that I had a track record of making bad decisions and if another problem arose I would be fired -- no discussion involved.

I believe that the real reason for me being in trouble was the fact of the same-sex wedding, but they didn't want to be on record for firing me for being homophobic. I knew that there was no chance that nothing would ever come up which they could use as a pretext to get rid of me. I was not wrong. Not long after this Bill and I observed a cashier have a long conversation with a customer while a line was forming. I went over to ask what was going on and was yelled at by the customer, who ended up elbowing me in the ribs as he left the store. I followed him outside and took a photo of his license plate, thinking I should maybe call the police (I ended up deciding against it). He called the corporate office to complain. I never found out what he said, but a week later I was fired. 

During that week Scott Ruth avoided talking to me and would not return my calls. The day before a scheduled vacation we had what was called a "Holiday Show" at one of the stores. This was a day where we were trained on how the corporate executives wanted us to merchandise our stores for Thanksgiving and Christmas. I went through the whole day, until at the very end Scott said he wanted to talk to me before I left for vacation. Then he and Donna fired me. Even though being unemployed was not something that I looked forward to, it was obvious for a long time that the situation wasn't going to get better. Even if I hadn't been fired, with the store closing I doubt that I would have a job. In similar situations managers had to apply for open positions. I was actually happy that I was fired. The pressure was off, the other shoe had dropped. 

I was fired on Thursday October 29, 2015. I took the weeknd off and made job hunting my job. 

Workin' Man - Part XXV - Target On My Back

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 Overall, that first year went well. I had finally earned a position as a store director. There was a lot more stress -- you never really know all the details of a job until you're in it -- and even with a raise I was making less money due to a lack of a bonus. But I had achieved a long-term goal -- I felt that I had finally proved that I could do it; that I was "worthy". I thought that, even though the store was still losing money, and I wasn't bonusing, I had gotten the place running smoothly and in some ways on autopilot. We did some fun things, like the chili contest, where Jamie, the Scanning Coordinator, won third place with a crock pot full of canned chili. We brought in a band to entertain the customers one Saturday. We had a group of regulars, retired guys who had breakfast just about every week day (one of whom made a point to tell my boss how I was doing a great job running the store). 

Things came crashing down Memorial Day weekend 2014, my second year as store director. 

I was working on Friday night, theoretically scheduled until 5:00pm, but still working at around 7:00 because we were swamped and I was helping out by checking, filling displays etc. I managed to get off my feet for about five minutes when one of the cashiers found me in my office -- he had forgotten to scan a customer's loyalty card, which meant that the customer wouldn't get all the points that his large purchase had earned for him. When I arrived I saw that there was some alcohol, so I rang it up since the cashier was a minor and couldn't legally sell alcohol. As I finished up the order I realized that the previous customer was still there and was glaring at me angrily. The cashier then let me know about the loyalty card not getting scanned. Correcting this could be done at the register, but it was a multi-step process that I wasn't totally sure that I knew how to do, and with the lines starting to build up again, I asked the cashier to take the customer over to the customer service counter, where I knew they could solve the problem pretty quickly and efficiently. I knew this was the quickest way to get the issue fixed. The customer refused, suggesting that I was sending him over there because he was Black. 

Yikes.

That was not a response I expected. I was already on my last nerve after being there all day, and the lines not getting any shorter. My father had passed away a couple of months previously, and I probably hadn't fully processed that yet. In retrospect I was probably a bit curt, but having the customer service clerk handle the issue was the best way to handle it. Frankly I was more than a little pissed at being accused of being a racist; I always felt that if you're going to lob that bomb, the discussion is over -- I'm done talking to you. There was shouting. There was more shouting. At one point I got into his bubble and asked him who he thought he was talking to, but immediately backed up, realizing that this was not a good look. He continued to yell and demand that I fix the problem at the register, but we were well past that point. I threatened to call the police. He finally left, but we weren't done. 

The next morning I was forwarded an email from this customer that had gone to the corporate office. The email wildly exaggerated what had happened, accusing me not only of bigotry, but of threatening him and using profanity. I quickly sent off an email giving my side of the story, but his email, if even partially believed, would have ended my career then and there. Words like "sinister" peppered his account, and his opinion that I was going to use violence against him. I couldn't function the rest of the day, I couldn't sleep that night. Initially, my immediate supervisor thought that I had handled myself professionally, but I found out that without my knowledge the Director of Loss Prevention had conducted an "investigation" on my day off and interviewed any employee who had been present. None of them contradicted my version of events. Scott Ruth, my boss, called the customer, apologized on my behalf, added the appropriate amount of points to his card and gave him a gift card.  Scott let me know how the conversation went and I breathed a sigh of relief. 

But we weren't done. 

The customer, after talking to Scott, called back the next day. He had changed his mind. He wanted me fired and would accept nothing less. This engendered more investigations. It dragged on. I had no idea if I would be fired. Then one evening Scott Ruth and Tom Schulte showed up at my store and presented me with security footage showing me stepping close to the customer. I pointed out that the video showed me stepping close to him, what is there to talk about? I certainly wasn't going to deny what could clearly be seen on video. After going back and forth over this issue for week, I felt that they were looking for an excuse to believe the customer. After rambling on for awhile I was told that they needed to decide what to do and they would let me know in the morning. I lost it. I pointed out that this had been dragging on for weeks and that they needed to make a decision: either fire me or not, but make a decision right now! They told me to give them fifteen minutes, so I walked around the store for a quarter hour. When I returned, I was told that I still had my job, but that I would be written up for what they said was bad judgement in the whole situation. Tom showed up the next morning and presented me with a write up. I still had my job, but it continued to drag on. 

My annual review was due in August. At B&R you were reviewed in 15 categories and scored from 1-4, with 4 being excellent and 2 being usually as low as anyone went. If you were really screwing up in a category, you received a 1. If you got a 1 in any category (or your total score was below a set amount), that automatically triggered a PIP -- a Performance Improvement Plan. A PIP gave you 90 days to resolve a performance issue or you were fired. I got a 1 in communications for the Memorial Day incident. So, even though the situation was supposedly wrapped up with the write-up in June, it was going to drag on for another 90 days. 

During those 90 days your immediate supervisor was supposed to give regular feedback on your progress toward improvement-- which I wasn't getting, so I went to Scott and asked why. I was concerned that I would be canned after 90 days without any warning, which would have been par for the B&R course. I figured with regular feedback, at least I would be able to see it coming. After that I had weekly meetings to discuss my progress, which he said he was happy with. At the end of 90 days in November 2014 I passed my PIP and wasn't fired, but this process had dragged on for almost six months. 

What I found infuriating was that at one point Tom Schulte had a conversation with the customer's employer (he was a UNL professor) and was told that he did this all the time. Nonetheless, B&R executives had long memories -- your "sins" were never truly forgiven. 

I had a target on my back and I was closely scrutinized. 

Workin' Man - Part XXIV - The Misfits and the Consultants

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 B&R Corporate definitely viewed the stores hierarchically. The Super Savers were at the top of the pyramid, with the busier Russ's Markets in the middle, with the small and money-losing stores at the bottom. ALPS, and later Save Best, were below the bottom. The idea was that the operational difficulty was linked to sales volume and square footage. The stores on the lower end of the continuum were viewed almost as training locations for store directors and department managers. The truth was that the smaller stores were in many ways more challenging than the larger stores. Part of this was the higher turnover in the smaller stores. Because managers were always on the lookout for better paying opportunities, the smaller stores always had a lot of managerial churn and unfailingly had the least experienced managers. This included the key position of assistant store director. Despite the unwritten rule that store directors would "do their time" in a smaller store before being "promoted" to a larger store, this wasn't applied to assistant store directors. Promising department managers wouldn't even apply to assistant store director positions in a small Russ's, waiting for a Super Saver opening. This left the pool of applicants for Russ's assistant positions disappointingly shallow. Department managers were notoriously difficult to keep as well. They were often on the lookout for better bonus prospects. 

For some reason for my first 18 months at Van Dorn the management positions were pretty stable. Part of it was that most of them were happy with the small store and didn't want anything bigger. Part of it was that most of them had some kind of HR target on their backs that made them unsuitable for promotion opportunities. My assistant store manager, Tim, had been a store director for another company, and eventually moved on to a bigger store and became a store director of a Super Saver, but for reasons of his own, never applied for promotion during that first year. While during my last 18 months corporate took several of my managers away in anticipation of closing the store and the expansion and remodel at 66th and O. I only lost one manager through corporate raiding during my early days. My Meat Manager was transferred out to a bigger store, and as usual, they didn't replace him -- I had to run an ad and interview for one myself. I had one manager, in the Bakery, quit after I was at Van Dorn for just a few months, but it ended up being an opportunity for a young assistant department manager to step up, and for me to hone my training and coaching skills. 

Alex had been the Assistant Deli Manager, but wanted to transfer out because he didn't get along with Kathy, the Deli Manager. (The corporate office Deli Director was adamant that we refer to the Delis as "Delicatessens". Of course this is the full name from which "Deli" is derived, but he insisted that in big cities like New York, no one called them "delis". As a native New Yorker, I did not find this to be true) We had an opening for Assistant Bakery Manager and Alex was transferred. Before he could get much training the bakery manager left. Some positions in the company attracted people with a more generalist skill set -- grocery, dairy frozen, general merchandise etc., but you really had to know something about bakery department production to be able to run a bakery department. There were NO applicants. Eventually, with the agreement of the Bakery Director and Operations VP, I decided to promote Alex to the position, despite his lack of experience. It was a mixed experiment. There were definitely areas that were sub par -- he really had no mentor to teach him the "ways of the bakery" other than occasional visits from the corporate Bakery Director, but he did a good job of keeping the shelves full and the team motivated. 

A position that I lost before I even started was HR Coordinator. The previous HRC had been selected for an assistant store director position, and left Van Dorn on the day I started. Donna, the corporate HR Director told me that she would fill the position, presumably by transferring someone in, but when I followed up with her a month later, she denied ever saying that. Over the years there were many such incidents of gaslighting by Donna. I went through several months of sharing HRCs with other stores, but my store's needs were always secondary. Eventually I got permission to hire for a hybrid position: HRC/Front End Manager. I had a front end manager, so I had the difficult decision of telling her that we were eliminating her position. I had the more difficult task of telling her that while she could apply for the new position, I did not consider her qualified for the HR part of the job. I had two applicants who I considered qualified. (There are always extremely unqualified applicants for HR positions, since no one seems to know what they really do!) Tim, who was a clerk in the corporate HR department, and Joe, who had been an evening grocery supervisor for me, but had transferred to another store. Tim, on the strength of his HR knowledge, was my first choice. When I offered him the position, he did not accept, stating that he didn't think he was ready. I never understood people who did this. I can understand when someone turns down a job because the compensation is too low, or there were requirements that did not come out in the interview, but why would you apply for a job that you didn't think you were ready for. Well, the reason was that Donna talked him out of it. She had talked him down in very harsh terms when I asked for her for her input. I was shocked that she would speak so disparagingly about someone on her team. I can only assume that she talked him out of it, although no one ever admitted it. So I hired Joe for the position. If I remember correctly he was in that position through the end of my second year. 

One of the things I tried look for in potential management hires was someone who liked managing and was good at it. It sounds obvious, but most people who apply for management positions do it only because it pays more. Of course, a bigger paycheck is a legitimate reason for wanting to advance, but without the skill and desire to lead people and the organizational skill needed to administer a department, you're not going to get a good manager. If someone applied to me for a management job I would not consider them if their only reason was a bigger paycheck. I remember a guy who I promoted to Assistant Produce Manager, mainly due to his familiarity with the department and his people skills. It didn't pay that well and he was submitting applications for management positions for various departments and other stores every week. I tried to get him to narrow his focus, to pick an area that he "had a passion for" and set his goals in a less scattershot way. The next application that he sent out included the statement "I have a passion for the Deli". He was hired, but quit a few months later to take a better paying job outside the company. 

In a previous post I mentioned a management class called "Managing Management Time" (MMT). One of my projects that I initiated during my weekly department managers' meetings was teaching the principles that I had learned in that class. One of the key ideas from MMT was the principle of "Whose Monkey Is It?" A "monkey" was a task or responsibility. As a manager you had to recognize what things were your responsibility and what was someone trying to get you to do their job. As a store director, my job did not involve the scheduling or allocation of resources in each department, this was the department manager's job. Of course I could provide guidance, or assist in solving problems, but operationally the day-to-day running of a department wasn't my "monkey". This was part of an effort to foster independence, not only among the management team, but the non-management employees. Another principle was the five levels of supervision. Level One was the typical new employee on their first day who doesn't know anything and has to be closely supervised and has to be told what to do every step of the way. Level Two was the employee who completed a task and then went back to their supervisor to find out what their next task was. Level Three was an employee who was given a list of tasks, or maybe had the same tasks to do each day, and reported back to their supervisor and needed to be told if there was anything new to be added to the list. Level Four was an employee who was told what their goals were but determined themself how to achieve those goals, reporting to their supervisor regularly. Level Five was where the employee was told the big picture and had the responsibility and freedom to make it happen, with only occasional reporting to their supervisor. I forbade my management team from operating at Level Three or lower, and directed them to shoot for Level Five. This was uncomfortable for some of them, some people just want to be told what to do. I believe this instruction had the effect of causing my managers to think before coming to me to solve their problems and to have possible solutions ready. It also motivated them to encourage their team to function more independently.  

B&R loved consultants. They brought in one guy who ran some Food 4 Less stores in California who walked around our stores insulting the store directors and referring to our "chicken shit" displays. Kelly Coday, a long time employee and manager called him out in a meeting where he claimed to compare his prices to Walmart on "all" his prices. Mr. Consultant's bullshit became more and more obvious every time he opened his mouth. Then there was the "Better Basics" guy. He had previously worked for another consulting company (I can't remember the name) from which he lifted all of their ideas and repackaged them as Better Basics. This guy was a bit more subtle in his condescension -- no overt insults anyway -- but he thought he had all the answers. I remember one time him telling me we had the "wrong" Greek yogurt, as if there was such as things as the "right" Greek yogurt. Like most consultants his main goal was to draw things out so he could get paid for more consulting. It took 18 months for his Better Basics bakery team to change the recipe for hard rolls. His alleged sense of humor was misogynistic and crude. He made a sexually suggestive "joke" to a female member of the team at one of the meetings; complaints by her and a store director who were present fell on deaf ears, as did a childish response to the word "retard" (stress on the second syllable, in the sense of "inhibit", referring to an aspect of the proofing process). B&R, while coming down hard on employees who were accused of sexual harassment, tolerated it from vendors, salesmen and consultants, presumably because there was no legal liability if it wasn't an employee who was doing the harassing. (Refer to an earlier story about the HVAC guy, fired by his own company for making sexual comments to a teenage girl, but was subsequently hired by Jane Raybould to remodel a store). But the worst consultant of all was Harold Lloyd.

Harold did a lot of presentations on various grocery-related topics for managers, as well as for all employees. He facilitated conferences among similar companies from different areas who were not directly competing ("Share Groups"). He was a dynamic speaker. he knew how to get your attention and keep it. I learned a lot about how to present in meetings from him. He also had a lot of practical ideas that were simple and obvious, but made sense. The first time in a Harold Lloyd presentation was magical. You had dozens of new ideas to take back to your store, and actually felt smarter. The problem was that every Harold Lloyd presentation was almost exactly the same. The elements might be switched around, put in different order, but no matter what the topic was: fresh departments, sanitation, marketing, you got the same information every...single...time. A few of us had been sent out to Des Moines for a two-day seminar facilitated by Lloyd. A few months later store directors and assistants drove out to Gretna for a short presentation. Dan, a fellow attendee at the Des Moines sessions, and I brought our handouts from the Iowa seminar. Harold must have been fielding criticism about his repetitiveness and started out with a rant about people who criticized him for it. He used some profane, and frankly disgusting language to counter his critics. He then began his presentation...every bit of which Dan and I found in our notes. 

This wasn't the last time I encountered Harold Lloyd. He had been facilitating a program whereby various committees would focus on specific areas in which to improve the company. A day-long meeting with the corporate directors and the committee chairs would be followed by a presentation for all managers in a movie theater. The day before the first meeting Operations VP Tom Schulte showed up at Van Dorn with Harold in tow and asked if they could attend my managers' meeting which was just about to start. I ran my meeting in the usual manner. I always tried to keep my meetings short and to the point. Only items that applied to everyone were on the agenda, problems specific to only one or two departments were handled "off-line". At the time I was also spending a few minutes teaching principles from Managing Management Time. The meetings tended to be 30 minutes, sometimes less -- we all had things to do and for some managers they were the only one scheduled in their department that day. I always ended my meeting with "Does anyone have anything for the group?" rather than the more common "Does anyone have any questions?". I had learned this from a previous store director -- "anything for the group" could include contributions, not just questions, and often resulted in great insights from people. At the end of the meeting Harold asked if he could address the group for about ten minutes; I was a bit skeptical about what he could offer, but agreed nonetheless. His contribution lasted well over twenty minutes and may have been close to half an hour and consisted mainly of criticisms of how I ran a meeting. He started with claiming that my meeting was too short, it should be an hour...at a minimum. I can't recall every other specific criticism, but I wondered how closely he had really been listening and not just regurgitating an oft-repeated speech when he said I shouldn't have ended my meeting with "Does anyone have any questions?" - which wasn't what I said. As I looked around the room I saw how uncomfortable my managers were with the attack. Once we were done I stalked out of the meeting room and headed for my office. Two of my managers followed me down and asked me if I was okay. I replied that I was going to leave the store for lunch to calm down.

When I returned an hour later Tom and Harold were still in the store. I encountered them in one of the aisles and Harold asked me what my problem was with his remarks (I was very obviously angry at his words) -- unwilling to get into an argument in earshot of employees and customers I asked he and Tom to come to my office. Once behind the closed door he once again asked me what I was so mad about, and I responded that he was a guest in my meeting and started right out criticizing and attacking. His rejoinder, if I had been a few decades younger, might have earned him a punch in the face "Don't lie!" He said, "it wasn't the first thing I said", retreating in to literalism (the literal first thing was likely something like "thanks for having me at this meeting). I stepped into his "bubble" and snarled "Do NOT call me a liar" and once again, he hid behind literalism "I didn't say you were a liar, I said you lied". (Why do people think that's somehow better?) There was a lot of shouting after that. Tom attempted to insert himself a couple of times, but decided to let us both blow off steam. Eventually, after I explained several different ways why how he conducted himself was offensive to me and insulting to my team, he aplogized. He offered to speak to my management team, but I refused his offer -- I didn't want him anywhere near my people. I found out that he relayed this incident, without mentioning my name or what store it took place in, during the day-long meeting at the corporate office. He painted himself as the hero of the story, someone willing to admit his mistakes and humbly apologize. A few people figured out that he was talking about me and heard the true story from me. The following day, in the all-managers presentation he repeated most of the same stories and examples that I had heard at Des Moines, Gretna, and several other presentations. 

He was still full of shit. 

The funny part was after the dust settled, Wes, the Dairy-Frozen Manager asked me if I believed in the magic of taking something personal from someone in order to curse them, or something like that. I told him that I believed something similar. Wes smiled and said "I've got his pen!"

Workin' Man - Part XXIII - Van Dorn Store Director

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 I was at the Van Dorn Russ's as the store director for slightly under three years. The first 18 months went pretty well -- I felt that I had the support of Operations VP Tom, Larry, who was in charge of the corporate department directors as well as Scott R, the District Manager who was my immediate supervisor. The remaining time was a nightmare. 

One very important thing that I was not told was that the store was slated to be closed. It had been losing money for years. It was situated on a very busy road but was difficult to get in or out of. Hy-Vee had built a large store a mile south, which was impossible to compete with, and B&R had committed to expanding and remodeling the Russ's at 66th & O streets two miles north -- more competition. Closing the store was a wise business decision, but they hid the fact from the staff and even from me. 

Because the store was losing money it was difficult for managers to earn bonuses, and anyone with any ambition had their eyes on bigger and more profitable stores. There were a few managers who liked the slower pace, and a few who had sabotaged their careers and were stuck there, but between corporate transferring out managers they thought had potential and others applying for positions in bigger stores after being trained at Van Dorn, it was a constant revolving door of managers. The ones that were left were, like me, kind of the misfits of B&R Stores. In a meeting that I had with Patrick, the outgoing store director (who I had trained at Pine Lake) I was informed of the myriad problems with most, if not all, of my managers. My Bakery Manager had instigated an OSHA investigation over an accident in her department. She and her assistant manager had been involved in a relationship -- she lodged a sexual harassment complaint against him, which he disputed by revealing sexual explicit texts that she has sent to him. He was transferred out. My Scanning/Pricing Manager had been written up repeatedly for spreading rumors about other employees. The Deli Manager had recently been written up for having a multitude of out-of-date items on the shelves and was so difficult to work for that we couldn't properly staff the department. One of my shift supervisors wanted to quit during my first week in the store after running over her own foot with a pallet jack. The Cash Office Manager had suffered brain injury a few years before and was routinely rude to everyone in the store. I fit right in with this crew. 

Despite the difficulty in keeping qualified staff, I attempted to lead those who stuck around in focusing on being great at the basics and good customer service. The "basics" included obvious things like never running out of ad items and keeping the bathrooms clean. Good customer service included minimizing lines at the checkouts (this would eventually be my downfall). Several of us non-cashiers were trained to run a checkstand and would "jump on" a register when it got busy. This usually took up five minutes and virtually eliminated lines. Saturday morning checking became a regular thing for me, which was unusual, since the only cashiering that I had ever done was when I substituted for the Save Best store director one week. I set up next to Bev, an experienced cashier, so I could ask her questions. 

One of the things that corporate management never seemed to understand was how difficult it was to properly staff a store with low sales. As I explained in a previous post, the labor budget for the store and for each department was based on a percentage of sales. You multiplied the budgeted percentage by projected sales to come up with what you could spend on staffing, then divide that by average wage to determine the number of hours you could schedule. The problem which never would be addressed was that it took a certain amount of labor hours to simply prepare a department for the day's business, even if the sales turned out to be $0. For example, in the production departments, such as Bakery, Deli, Smokehouse, you were making product, not just opening boxes and putting items on the shelf. This took time and people to do it. Even non-production departments needed employees to keep the shelves stocked.  

While it's always a good idea to evaluate your staffing needs -- you don't always need as many people as you think you do -- there's a limit to how much cutting you can do. One of the more ridiculous recurring budgeting scenarios was departments whose budget didn't even allow for one full-time employee, (not even a full-time manager) yet since product ordering, stocking and basic customer service still need to be done, employees would be pulled from other departments. Week after week I would plug sales projections into the spreadsheet that I had developed years before only to see the depressingly low available hours appear. Some of the hours projections, if followed, would have made it difficult, if not impossible, to carry out our responsibilities. I made the decision to staff my store at a level that I believed was needed to be able to provide good customer service and meet the basic requirements to operate a grocery store. This meant that I was voluntarily forgoing any possibility of receiving a quarterly bonus for meeting the budgeted labor goal. But it also meant that my employees would not have their hours cut to achieve an arbitrary number. 

My immediate supervisor at the time, Vice President of Operations Tom Schulte, scheduled an appointment with me to "show me how to write a schedule". I welcomed the input, because I sure didn't know how to cover all the departments with the labor dollars available. His input, however, was a huge disappointment. He started reviewing with me the math needed to calculate available hours for each department, which I already knew how to do. My method of sales projections were always spot on, and the math for calculating hours was pretty simple. I told him that I knew how to do the math, but what I didn't know how to do was write a schedule that would enable me to properly run a store with those hours. He didn't know what to say to that, he just mumbled something about none of the previous store directors could make labor either. 

I have to say that my relationship with Tom during my first year as a store director was pretty good. Despite having made some foolish mistakes in my career, I think he was impressed by the efforts I took to prepare myself for the job. He was understanding about the reality that the store was losing money due to circumstances beyond my control (we were budgeted to lose money -- but lost even more than what was budgeted) and focused on my efforts to improve the operational aspects of the store. Any time he stopped by for a "store walk" I received good feedback and no nitpicking when things weren't 100 percent. Company president Pat Raybould was another story. 

Pat had two idiosyncrasies that made his visits to the stores dreaded events. Whenever he was out of town he would bring back ideas that he saw in other stores and pushed for us to adopt them, no matter how inappropriate. After visiting a store in Texas that had a giant display of nopalitos (cactus leaves), he would decide that all of our stores need cactus leaf displays. On one trip where he stopped in a small town Casey's convenience store he noticed that the Casey's seemed to be the center of activity for that little town. From that, he came to the conclusion that we needed to make our stores the center of activity. To do this we were supposed to schedule "events" one evening a week. We started out with a kids' night that was well-attended, but didn't result in any measurable increase in sales, which was the whole point. Most of the stores did this for a few weeks and just quietly stopped, hoping that Pat wouldn't notice (he didn't). 

Pat's other bad habit was that he never forgot about someone's screw up. Another store director relayed a story to me about a visit from Pat on National Doughnut Day while he (the store director) was running himself ragged getting ready for the day's massive doughnut sales. Pat wanted to talk to him "upstairs" and brought up an incident from several years previous when the Dairy manager was doing a poor job at rotation. According to Pat, this incident was evidence that the store director was didn't have his head in the game. It didn't matter that this store director was a top performing leader, had taken action to solve the problem with the Dairy manager, eventually firing him, and it was several years in the past. In my store he would get it into his head that certain people were problem employees. He saw one of my janitors get a cup of water from the Deli soda dispenser and became convinced that he was always slacking off. Our evening supervisor didn't notice that lines were forming at the checkstands (and no one called him) and Pat became convinced that he wasn't doing his job, despite the evening supervisors having duties such as adding new items to the shelves and unloading the trucks that took them away from the front of the store. He would also quiz employees about areas of the store that they had no knowledge of and draw the wrong conclusion from that. 

One of my weirdest Pat encounters involved an odor that was detectable as you first walked in the front door. It was fishy, but not really that strong. (This was an old building with plumbing issues -- there were always odors) Pat was on a mission to find the source of the small. We ended up back at the fish case. We stood in front of the fish display and could not smell any fish. We went into the back cooler and found some fish where the paper covering the fish was askew. Pat determined that a fishy smell at the front of the store, which you couldn't detect right in front of the fish case was somehow caused by fish in a closed cooler at the back of the store. 

Fish...that reminds me of the stupidity of the full-service fresh meat and fish case. Hy-Vee was known for having a full-service meat case 24 or 30 feet long if I remember correctly, staffed by three or four employees all day and evening. In order to compete when Hy-Vee built a new store just south of us B&R decided that the Van Dorn Russ's needed a full service meat case. There were two problems. One was that our display case was a measly 8-12 feet long and we did not have enough staff to man the counter. In the evening we had one employee, who in addition to serving customers had to clean the back room. In a money losing store, this was a ridiculous addition. 

Another useless section that most Russ's Markets had was what we called Specialty Foods. It mainly consisted of "fancy" versions of mainstream products like mustard, or whole grain flour. Some of those sold well, but most of the specialty items went out of date before we could sell even half a case. It also included "international" foods. Some of those, like Mexican or Mediterranean foods sold well enough, but we also sold foods from the United Kingdom, a nation not known for their cuisine. One of these U.K. items was spotted dick. Spotted dick is a traditional British steamed pudding made with suet and dried fruit. I was at a conference in Florida with a several other Russ's store directors and Pat when I struck up a lunchtime conversation with a store director from another state about specialty foods. I used "spotted dick" as an example, and repeated the words "spotted dick" several times. Pat, with an uncomfortable look on his face, asked me if I needed to use that kind of language. I quickly backpedaled in my mind, scanning to see if I had dropped an "F-Bombs" or any other "bad words" -- nope, I came up blank. It turns out that he didn't know what "spotted dick" was and thought I was referring to another type of dick. Classic Pat. 

St. Patrick's Day: Green vs. Blue

Every year around this time you see lists of things that everyone supposedly gets wrong about St. Patrick's Day. Many of them are correct, for example the tradition of corned beef and cabbage is an American invention. But one just seemed off the first time I heard it. This was the supposed "fact" that the color of St. Patrick was blue, not green. The first time I heard it was from a know-it-all from the B&R corporate office. (The same guy who thought we didn't need to account for the different origins of Spanish-speaking customers when doing our Hispanic merchandising)  According to the Wikipedia article on "St. Patrick's Blue", English King Henry VIII was the first English king to declare himself "King of Ireland". He had an official flag designed that featured a gold harp on a blue field. The color blue in this case was not specifically associated with St. Patrick.

The color blue's actual association with St. Patrick only dates back to the 1780's and the Anglo-Irish  and Protestant 'Order of St. Patrick'. Yes, Anglo-Irish, the descendants of those who the English had settled in Ireland in order to keep the locals in line. In fact, the order had considered orange as their official color, but decided that the sectarian associations with the color would be too obvious. Orange was the color of militant Protestants who aligned themselves with the English. William of Orange was the Protestant champion in the revolt against the Catholic King James II. (For those who are unaware, the pro-English Irish tended to be Protestant while the pro-independence Irish were predominantly Catholic) There is no evidence that St. Patrick even had an official color and if so, what it was, but there is a large consensus that "St. Patrick's Blue" was an "invention of tradition" to bolster the choices of the tenuously Irish 'Order of St. Patrick'.

Native Irish societies, such as 'Irish Catholic Confederation' and 'The Friendly Brothers of St. Patrick' founded in  the 1680's and 1750 respectively, used green as their official color, partially as a counter to the English use of blue as an identifying hue. During the 1790's Irish nationalists adopted green as their color as well. The phrase "wearin' of the green" comes from a song from that era referring to Irish nationalists being persecuted for wearing green. As time went by the color green became more and more associated with Ireland and by extension, St. Patrick's Day, a day when Irish heritage was celebrated. When the mass emigrations to the United States took place in the mid 1800's to early 1900's green was firmly in place as the color symbolizing Irish independence, Irish culture and especially independence from England. It's doubtful that many Irish thought about whether green was specifically associated with St. Patrick, but knew that it was intimately associated with a free Ireland.

Wear the green...forget that blue nonsense.
 

Workin' Man - Part XXII - Trouble Every Day

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 Even though my time at Pine Lake was probably the high point of my B&R Stores career, I did manage to get myself in trouble a couple of times. In B&R Stores, once you got into trouble, the target on your back never really went away. In addition to my own experience I was aware of others who never fully recovered from one bad decision. One really stupid thing I did was play a prank on our janitor, a "special needs" adult. We'll call him Danny. Danny loved to joke around with the rest of the employees, and everyone tried to make him feel part of the team. Part of this involved the normal ribbing that employees give each other. (In retrospect this was a really stupid and insensitive thing to do, and I hesitate to include it in this review of my work life, but it is important to understand the perspective of how the corporate brass viewed me.) One afternoon, about a week before the holiday party I called Danny pretending to be the company president, Pat Raybould. I asked him if he had a necktie, which he would be required to wear during the awards ceremony. (I know -- stupid). Before I could find him and tell him that it was a prank, he had called his mother to tell her that he was receiving an award at the holiday party. Mom complained. I got written up. In person. By the company VP of Operations. (He told my store director that he couldn't be trusted to convey the seriousness of the issue). Not only was I written up, but I had to go to the employee assistance program for counseling. And I was barred from attending the holiday party. And to pour salt in the wound, I was charged $20 for not attending the party! (When we signed up to attend the annual party we had to agree to be charged $20 if we ended up not going). 

The other thing that caused a target to get permanently affixed to my back involved the store newsletter from a few years back. Once I had been removed from the editorial staff of "Nine's News" I started my own newsletter, "Words of Wisdom by Ill-Gotten Booty". After a while I turned it into a blog which garnered readers from around the company. This was attention that I should have avoided! Since the subject matter was mostly store related, I was no doubt asking for trouble. The first article that got me noticed was when the Lincoln Journal-Star included the 48th & O Super Saver night crew in a series about Lincoln after dark. The photos included in the article showed multiple violations of what I referred to as the "Schulte Doctrine", Operations VP Tom Schulte's micromanaging of night crew operations. Store Director Nick gave me a heads-up that the blog was getting attention, but nothing further was said about it. I regularly wrote humorous Top Ten lists, and featured one of the Top Ten Reasons to Attend the B&R Holiday Party, which ended up being referenced on stage at the party itself. I was never confronted about it, but it came up several years later in the aftermath of another situation and incorrectly referred to as Top Ten Reasons Not to Attend the B&R Holiday Party. You truly couldn't put your mistakes behind you at B&R Stores. 

For most store director openings the corporate office generally promoted assistant store directors or brought in someone from outside the company. And since most assistant store directors aspired to be store directors, every time a store director retired, or a new store was built, most, if not all, assistant store directors applied for the position -- including me. Over the years I applied for quite a few opening:

1. Bishop Heights Russ's
2. Bishop Heights Russ's (again)
3. 66th & O Russ's
4. Cornhusker Super Saver
5. 30th & Ames Omaha Super Saver
6. Russ's Havelock
7. Generic Super Saver (they were moving people around)
8. Russ's 33rd & Hwy 2
9. Russ's 70th & Van Dorn
10. Generic store director position that turned out to be Russ's 70th & Van Dorn (again - I got this one!) 

The first few times I was turned down it didn't bother me too much. The people who were promoted instead of me were definitely qualified. There never was a hierarchy of people "in line" for a promotion, each opening was a free-for-all. But it was when they took over a store in Omaha from another company when I began to think I wasn't even being considered. There weren't many applicants, mainly because the store was in a rough neighborhood. They ended up hiring someone from outside the company, which didn't do much for my self worth. Then, the outside director, before ever setting foot in the store, decided he didn't want the job. An evening supervisor from the Millard Super Saver had been hired as the grocery manager, and quickly promoted to assistant store director when no qualified candidates applied. Since he had been in the store from Day One, he was subsequently promoted to store director. Where the early rejections didn't sting so badly because individuals with more seniority and at least equal ability were being promoted, now I was starting to see new, less experienced assistant store directors leapfrog over me, including those whom I had trained!

I had been passed over a few more times when I finally decided to find out why I was not considered qualified for promotion. I believe that I had established a record for the number of times i applied for, and was passed over for, promotion. I cornered Operations VP Tom Schulte at the corporate office one afternoon and asked him to give me honest feedback about why I was being passed over and what I needed to do to advance. I don't think he really had a clear idea, but I'm sure he was influenced by my reputation as (1) Being rough on people - which really was a thing of the past at that point and (2) The incidents which arguably demonstrated that I did not make good decisions. In our conversation it was pretty clear that he had no idea what my management style was, or what my good points (or bad points) as a manager were. He agreed to work with me and give me feedback, which he regularly did. During this time I was passed over one more time. During the interview I was asked if I was willing to manage the Save Best store, a small, store with a total of eight employees. I responded that I would, if offered it, but that I didn't think it was a good fit for me. I was told that that answer was the main reason I was passed over. But I did not give up. 

Around Christmas 2012 at Pine Lake we were shooting for a store sales record. My projections had clearly shown that we would exceed $1 million in sales for the first time. A new Super Saver had been built in the Fallbrook neighborhood and Brian, who was the store director at 48th & O, had been named the new store director, which meant that there would be an opening there. The posting was simply for "Lincoln Store Director" - I applied, but didn't know ultimately where I would end up if offered the promotion. As it turned out, because there was a new store opening and one of the Super Saver store directors was transferred there, and another store director had retired, a merry-go-round of director reassignments resulted in the Russ's at 70th & Van Dorn being offered to me. I had applied, but hadn't been interviewed, possibly because my last application and interview hadn't been that long before. Tom Schulte showed up at the store and without any ceremony offered me the position. I accepted, with the condition that he allow me to be flexible in order to continue to officiate weddings. I started as the Russ's 70th & Van Dorn Store Director the first week of January 2013.

In a lot of ways being an assistant store director was the best of both worlds. I had a lot of authority and wrote my own schedule; I had Saturdays off to do weddings; I was somewhat shielded from corporate nonsense by my store director. But I was still somewhat ambitious and felt that I had something to prove after so many rejections. I was a little nervous about being given a store that was losing money and was notorious for being unable to make the labor budget, but figured I would somehow make it work. 

Workin' Man - Part XXI - Pine Lake Adventures

 Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

If you're going to work in retail you're going to run into rude and obnoxious customers. One of the most infamous was a man we called "Handbasket Guy". We kept a stack of handbaskets near the entrance doors, but as customers used them they accumulated near the check stands until someone collects them and brings them over to the entrance. Until this was done there was a stack near the exit doors. Handbasket Guy always entered through the exit doors. If there was no handbaskets there (right where they shouldn't be) he would walk up to the nearest employee and simply bark out the word "handbasket". If that was all he did, it wouldn't be so bad, but he was an utter asshole to the cashiers. He somehow had it in his head that cashiers were legally required to ask a customer if they had found everything that they came in for. It was true that we wanted them to ask that, but no one got in trouble for not saying it. Handbasket Guy would berate the cashiers if they didn't ask him if he had found everything. It got so bad that if we saw him get in line a manager would take over. I used to enjoy being over-the-top, obnoxiously polite to him. 

Customers who also worked in retail were those whom you thought would know better, and make allowances, but it was not the case. Products in a grocery store are stocked in a variety of methods. Most grocery items are stocked overnight by the night crew; Dairy and Frozen as well; Produce and Meat usually are stocked by their staff in the morning. There are, however, items that are stocked by "merchandisers", employees of the companies that provide the products. These include, soda, cookies and crackers, and beer. When they get in to do this varies, but at least some it still remains to be filled when the first customers make their way in. 

One thing about Sundays is that most department managers are off. The Store Director and Grocery Manager are also off, so usually the Assistant Store Director (in this case, me) has to do double duty, overseeing the whole store plus handling Grocery Manager responsibilities, including doing the grocery order. The first thing I did was take a quick lap around the store to make sure there were no major problems, and then commence ordering. These tasks would take a couple of hours. Around 7:00am Roger, who worked in the corporate office, came in to do his shopping. One of his regular purchases was 2-liter bottles of Diet 7-Up. Unfortunately, the 7-Up merchandiser usually didn't get in that early, so the Diet 7-Up 2-litters were often empty. Roger never said anything.  

One fine day, in a conversation with company president Pat Raybould, he informed me that a "good customer" was complaining that we were always out of things when he came in on Sunday mornings. (Pat invariably referred to anyone who complained to him as "a good customer" -- I don't know if thought there were "bad customers"). I knew he had to be talking about Roger, so I just asked Pat if that's who our "good customer" was. When Pat confirmed that this was the case, I suggested that Roger simply ask me about anything that appeared to be out and I'd check for him. I also suggested that perhaps as a fellow "associate" Roger might be expected to have enough respect for those of us in the stores to approach us directly. Going forward I started my day by grabbing a case of  Diet 7-Up 2-liters and putting them on the shelf and Roger always talking to me instead of complaining!

It wasn't always customers who were obnoxious, sometimes it was fellow employees. In a previous article I mentioned Joe, who had been the Meat Department Manager when I worked at 48th & O -- someone whom I didn't get along with. He had been transferred to our Meat Department at Pine Lake, bringing with him his "my way or the highway" attitude. He started battling with other department managers right away. As is probably pretty obvious, some items in a grocery store need to be refrigerated. Milk, of course was a major product in need of refrigeration. Before Joe arrived we had been putting overflow milk racks in the Meat cooler on busy weeks. Joe did not like anything from other departments being stored in "his" coolers and engaged in a running battle with the Dairy Manager. One morning he and I had a confrontation over some ad items that we were out of on the first day of the ad. One of the things Nick was very serious about was all ad items being fully stocked. After all, we're inviting people into the store because we allegedly have certain items which we have reduced the price for -- how stupid do we look if we are out of these items? On Day One? Joe took offense at me asking him what happened to cause us to be out. He erupted in anger, turning the discussion into a personal attack. When I registered a complaint with HR I discovered (according to corporate HR) that he had no similar complaints in his personnel file, which I thought was, as the English say, bloody amazing since I was personally aware of several similar incidents involving Joe with other managers. Over the years Joe got his way because no one wanted to deal with his temper, including his store directors. Nick, my store director backed me up, and at least one complaint went into his file. Not long after this incident he left the company, possibly because the new Director of Meat Department Operations wasn't interested in putting up with his nonsense. 

Another manager who I must mention was a Dairy Manager named Peter. He had some previous experience as a Dairy Clerk at another store, where things were somewhat looser than they were at Pine Lake. At his previous store the emphasis was on the Dairy aisle looking neat and orderly, although not necessarily full. Peter's previous manager would disguise empty slots on the shelves by filling them with adjacent items. There was also a laser focus on the storage cooler being neat and orderly, without much in the way of backstock. Since there was nothing "in the back" when an item sold out, there were many "outs" in that department. Milk stock levels were handled by calling the milk suppliers to bring in special deliveries every day, instead of ordering enough to get through to the next delivery. Since the department looked good, no one at corporate complained. We were not going to allow this to happen at Pine Lake and let Peter know that the way things were done at his previous store were unacceptable. He fought us every step of the way. One of our battles involved carts. At his old store stock carts were used to store the little backstock they had in the cooler. At Pine Lake we needed them emptied before the night crew came in, as they used them all to run the evening delivery truck. I lost track of how many times he was told not to keep carts in his cooler until one Sunday morning I came in to find a half dozen of them in the cooler, stacked high with dairy products. I dumped them all over and removed them. I may have made my point. I have mentioned that our Grocery Manager was named Peter as well. One afternoon I called him on the walkie-talkie, but Dairy Peter responded. "I was calling the real Peter, not you..."Fake Peter". And Fake Peter became his name for the rest of his time there. Soon after he applied for a Dairy Manager position at his old store, where he ended up getting fired after Nick was transferred there. 

One of the things I got interested in while at Pine Lake was craft beer. It had been a long time since I was a Bud/Miller/Coors type of drinker and made Leinenkugel's Red my go-to beer. Around this time some craft brewers were starting to distribute their beers more widely and getting space in grocery stores. Major labels were also experimenting with different styles. I remember being intrigued by a Michelob six-pack that included Märzen (aka Octoberfest), Pale Ale and Stout. Samuel Adams was producing seasonal 12-packs with various beer styles. I started trying out the different types and began acquire some expertise in differentiating among pale ales, India Pale Ales (IPS's), blondes, red, stouts, porters, lagers, kölsches and more. I attended the Lazlo's monthly beer tour with some coworkers and turned my old Ill-Gotten Booty blog into a beer review blog. One of my goals at work was to get all my daily tasks done early in the day and all my weekly tasks done early in the week, this meant that Friday afternoons were just free time. What did I do with this free time? I would wander around the beer aisle, trying (and usually succeeding) to convince people to upgrade to some craft beer. Occasionally I would join the Spirits Manager and do some sampling. Being "the craft beer guy" became my Super Saver identity. Fellow employees sought my advice regarding what beers to buy and our craft beer sales were well above the company average. 

One of the things I had learned early in my working life was to always verify that you are being paid what you should. Since I was on salary I always received the same amount each week, but there were two areas that bore watching: vacation hours and bonuses. Vacation time was allocated based on the average number of hours that you worked per week the previous year, multiplied by the number of weeks you were entitled to (2 weeks after one year, 3 weeks after 10 years, 4 weeks after 15 years). For salaried managers, since we worked 45-hour weeks, we would receive 45 hours multiplied by the number of earned weeks. The problem was that the corporate office was only reducing a manager's vacation bank by 8 hours for every vacation day taken, when they should have charged 9. Eventually they figured it out and they correctly recalculated managers' vacation balances, causing some managers to lose a couple of days that they thought they had. Around the same time the corporate office started to keep better track of vacation approvals. They distributed to each store director a list for each employee showing how much vacation time they had earned over the course of their employment, and how much vacation they had used during that time. Some employees had used in excess of what they had earned; store directors had been approving vacation time, and vacation pay for people who hadn't earned it. Since there was no central tracking, this went on for years. A lot of people were very angry, thinking quite reasonably that a representative of the company had authorized the vacation pay, and that they shouldn't be penalized. 

For years employees were able to roll over unused vacation time, but following the vacation hours crackdown the corporate office decided that only two weeks per year could be carried over. I worked with a guy who had nine weeks accumulated! Since we had a year to use it up before losing it, he took every Friday off as a vacation day for a full year! But no, they weren't done changing vacation rules! Previously a new year's earned vacation was added to your vacation "bank" on the anniversary of your full time hire date. This was changed to your hire date, whether full or part time. I benefited from this, since I was hired in February 1999 and went full time that August, so I was able to access my new year's vacation hours six months early. Others did not. One manager I worked with had his full time hire date in January, but his actual hire date was in November. Since this pushed back when he could access vacation hours, he was effectively cheated out of a year of vacation. 

Bonuses were something that required a bit of calculation. Most management positions were assigned a budget goal for gross profit. How close to the goal their final gross profit was determined what bonus tier they were in. Each tier would then receive a different percentage of their base salary as a bonus. There was a similar bonus for achieving labor goals. I noticed early on that Kipp, the CFO, often made errors when calculating bonuses. He always corrected them when it was pointed out, but he was usually quite ungracious about it. (i.e. he was an asshole) I attempted to teach the other managers how to calculate their bonuses using simple math, but some of them seemed immune to learning and seemed content to just trust Kipp, who really couldn't be trusted. In an industry where understanding profit margins was so important, it was stunning how many people that I worked with couldn't grasp grade school math. 

One of the things I enjoyed about my time at Pine Lake was the sense of teamwork, especially among the shift manager team. For the whole five years that I was there Nick K was the store director and Shannon was the HR Coordinator. Peter was in the grocery department, first as the assistant grocery manager and later as the grocery manager. Jamie, who was kind of a younger version of me, was the assistant grocery manager the final few years. Jamie was very rough around the edges and always said what he meant, which resulted in him often being at odds with other members of the store team. But for some reasons the grocery clerks, who were mostly high school boys, absolutely loved him. He had a system for the swing shift and an informal checklist of things that had to be done the last hour before the night crew came in: the 4 B's. The B's were Back Room, Bathrooms, Bulk Foods and Break Room - all areas that had to be cleaned or put in order by end of shift. Another unusual thing -- in my previous stores, and what I had seen in other stores in the company, grocery clerks were usually the laziest and most likely to screw around of anyone in the store. Part of the problem was that it was an entry-level low-paying, low skill job, but the clerks were nonetheless expected to work independently. Our grocery clerks, in contrast, all seemed to take pride in their work and could be counted upon to get the job done. Occasionally though, bad ones would slip through. 

One of the parts of organizing the back room at night included taking out stacks of milk crates that were stored on wheeled carts out behind the store. One Sunday night Shannon, who was serving as evening supervisor that night, noticed that some of the stacks seemed a little heavier than usual and discovered that many of the crates were filled with bottles of Jack Daniels and other whiskeys. They all denied having anything to do with it, but a Loss Prevention investigation resulted in four grocery clerks and a Dairy clerk being charged with theft and, of course, fired. Later in my time there was a clerk that we suspected of theft, but hadn't actually caught in the act. Nick convinced him that there were security cameras in the areas that he was stealing from (there weren't) and he immediately confessed!

Most of the clerks were a dependable part of the team. During the holidays Nick assigned each manager a section of the store to keep full, along with a grocery clerk to assist. Since, as I have previously outlined, during the holidays we didn't adhere to the regular schedule, it was all hands on deck, so we had plenty of people during the peak times. Periodically we would go down our assigned aisles, make a list of what we needed, head to the back room where we had a section set aside to store the fast moving items and fill 'er up! It was sometimes difficult to keep ahead of demand, and trying to stock while the aisles were crammed front to back with customers was not fun, but we got the job done. 

Holidays were always the time when the whole store really came together, we worked hard, and the salaried managers worked long hours. My first Christmas Eve at Pine Lake was a bit of a surprise though. About an hour before the store closed Nick called all the managers and other key people up into his office. I couldn't imagine what was going on, and was quite surprised when Nick started passing around bottles of beer! This was a tradition that had started when Nick worked at the Millard Super Saver and that we carried on the whole time I was at Pine Lake. I also carried over my tradition of guarding the door at Christmas Eve closing time. One year we had a bunch of new grocery clerks who just couldn't believe that I wouldn't let people in after 6:00pm sharp. They all came out to observe this strange phenomenon! But the wildest Christmas Eve was when a pitcher for the New York Yankees stopped in.

I was at the front door as usual, and just before 6:00 a man with a small baby tucked under his ran into the store. A few minutes later I saw him run out...without the baby! I had a walkie-talkie and called Nick in a panic. I imagined that this guy had abandoned his child on Christmas Eve. It turned out that he had left his wallet in the car and the women on the check stands volunteered to watch his baby while he ran out to get it. The guy was Joba Chamberlain, former pitcher for the Nebraska Cornhuskers baseball team and current New York Yankee, who that same year was pulled over for DUI with an open bottle of Crown Royal that he had purchased at the Pine Lake Super Saver on the console and talked crap about Yogi Berra. 

Workin' Man - Part XX - Falklands Jalapeño-Pineapple Pancakes

Well, I get up at seven, yeah

And I go to work at nine
I got no time for livin'
Yes, I'm workin' all the time

It seems to me
I could live my life
A lot better than I think I am
I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

'Cause I get home at five o'clock
And I take myself out an ice cold beer
Always seem to be wondering'
Why there's nothin' goin' down here

I guess that's why they call me
They call me the workin' man

"Workin' Man" - Words & Music by Lee & Lifeson 

 Well, this was something different. In my previous management assignments I was looked at as the new guy who didn't know anything. When hired as a Grocery Manager at 48th & O my grocery experience was negligible. When I was promoted to assistant store director at Cornhusker I was replacing a popular and knowledgeable individual who had a very different management style. In both stores I was able to prove myself, and when I arrived at the South 27th & Pine Lake Super Saver I had a reputation for knowing what I was doing, and for being a tough but fair manager. (Although one person told Bob, our General Merchandise (GMD) Manager, that I was "moody" - fair enough!) In retrospect my five years as ASD at Pine Lake were probably the best years of my grocery career. Store Director Nick was easy to work for - he gave clear direction, but was not a micromanager, and the center store managers were experienced, knew their jobs and took direction well. 

One of the big differences starting out at Pine Lake was that, unlike my start at Cornhusker, things were organized. Nick was not a "nice guy" - he was friendly enough - but did not play favorites and kept a sharp eye on what was going on in the store. (He was also 25 years younger than I was) Shannon, our HR Coordinator was also pretty direct. My old Store Director, Matt K, once remarked that the employees at Pine Lake must have always been pretty clear about expectations with the three of us in charge. Employees definitely had their preferences for who they would go to. What they didn't realize was that we talked all the time and made sure we were in agreement on major issues. There was no going to "dad" because you didn't like "mom's" decision. One incident stands out. I was upstairs, looking out the window to the sales floor below and saw Tom C, the Frozen Foods Manager talking to Nick. Technically, since I was his immediate supervisor, he should have been coming to me. When Nick finished talking to Tom, I asked Nick what the conversation was about. Tom C was asking if he really needed to work until close on Christmas Eve. Nick asked him "What did Tom J tell you?" and followed up with "Whatever Tom J told you, that's what you need to do". We had each other's backs. 

Tom C, as it turned out, was not a very good Frozen Foods manager, and as it further turned out, Nick & I dropped the ball when it came to supervising him. In some respects the department appeared to be in good shape. He hardly ever ran out of anything, he always had his ad displays up timely, and the profit margin was always at or above budget. I was guilty, as was the company overall, of not questioning success. Tom C was a big man, he had to be well over 500 pounds. One morning he fell on some ice in the parking lot and hurt himself so badly that he couldn't work for what turned out to be seven months. As Center Store Manager I was his immediate supervisor and temporarily took over managing the department. I figured I could have a clerk do the stocking and I could order and build displays. I quickly found out what Tom C was hiding. 

Every department utilizes "backstock". During an ad you try to have enough on hand to get you through the ad week, in this case you store it in a walk-in freezer. Sometimes you just order too much, and you "run the backstock" before putting in an order so you don't order what you already have. When an ad is over, any unsold ad items are put in a secondary display and priced somewhere between regular prices and ad price. Tom C was not managing his backstock. When I took over the department there were at least 80 pallets of assorted backstock in the freezer. Ten pallets would have been excessive. Every shelf was filled, and every inch of floor space was full of pallets. After stocking the load from a delivery, Tom C would put any excess on a pallet in the freezer and then never touch it again. On his next order he would bring in more of what he already had. After an ad was over he would put what wasn't sold on a pallet in the freezer and then never touch it again. The result was that every week the backtock grew and grew. It's not like it was even organized. Every pallet had a jumble of different types of stock. It was a mess. Tom C, realizing that his department was such a mess that he would not be able to get it in order, turned in his resignation. We hired a replacement, who we were very upfront with regarding the shape the freezer was in. He lasted less than a week before he claimed that he fell in the freezer and spent another week on light duty. 

Nick had the idea that before we hire another manager the first step would be to organize everything. He and I, joined by Assistant Grocery Manager Jamie, and a team of grocery clerks, pulled all the pallets out one by one and organized them by type of product: potatoes on one pallet, frozen vegetables on another, frozen dinners on a third, and so on. When we started it was so disorganized that there literally were potatoes on every pallet. This took two different sessions to get everything organized. While we were working we found several pallets of old ad items that were seriously out of date, those had to be thrown out or donated. We probably got the number of pallets down to 65. For a while we had grocery clerks pulling pallets out and stocking from them each night. We had wrapped each pallet in plastic and afixed a sign with the last date that it had been worked. We had a system. Except Nick caught the grocery clerks rolling out pallets, unwrapping them, moving the top layer around, and then putting them back. He banned the clerks from running backstock. Which meant that me and some of the other managers had to do it.

Little by little the number of pallets decreased. There were some mornings when the Frozen Foods order was less than a dozen cases because we had so much backstock! We had probably got the number of pallets down to around 40 when Pat Raybould stuck his head in the freezer one day and freaked out. He demanded that we set a date when the backstock would be down to a reasonable level (10 pallets?). I tried to tell him that it was impossible to do, we had no idea how long it would take us to get to an arbitrary number. Of course he had no idea how bad it had been and how much progress we had made, but the law of diminishing returns was setting in, as well as the lack of any more low-hanging fruit, and a dearth of other available cliches. I eventually picked a random date, which we ended up not making, but he soon forgot about it, as he usually did. 

One of the side effects of having to run Frozen Foods for so long was that I learned to drive the standing forklifts. In addition to the traditional sit-down forklift, Pine Lake had two stand-up forklifts. Since at the time we were the only store that had them anyone transferring from another store didn't have any experience with them. The advantage to them was that they had a tighter turning radius, which was helpful in narrow aisles. The down side was that if you were trained on the sit-downs, everything felt backwards. I had to work in the freezer every morning, which, once we cleared the floor of all the excess pallets, was very spacious. This made it the perfect place to practice driving the stand-ups. More on forklift adventures later. 

One of the first things I did after transferring to Pine Lake was to convince Nick that we needed to adjust our schedules during the holidays. Officially those of us who were salaried were required to work a minimum of 45 hours a week. In most stores this meant that you were scheduled for 45 hours, but if an crisis came up you worked extra. No allowance was made for getting those hours back. What I proposed was that we plan to average 45 hours per week during a holiday season. This meant that during Thanksgiving or Christmas week we all might be working 60+ hours, but we would work 25 or 30 on the slower weeks. This was difficult to do over the Christmas holidays since we were busy leading up to Christmas, which was immediately followed by a busy New Year's, with year-end inventory in their somewhere. I would start mapping out the managers' schedule well in advance in order to get Nick's approval (especially since I was writing his schedule too). The benefit to scheduling this way was that the store had the maximum number of managers during the peak times, while no one worked more than an average of 45 hours per week. Of course the corporate office would not have approved of this arrangement, and we sure weren't going to tell them! We also instituted a requirement of mandating that department managers work certain peak times during the holidays. All managers had to work until close on Christmas Eve, and work a 12-hour shift the day before Thanksgiving. Nick and I scheduled ourselves this way too, so no one could complain. I was surprised to learn that in a lot of stores the schedule didn't change for holiday weeks and stores were staffed during peak times by third tier evening supervisors instead of department managers. There was some complaining, but I believed that if you agreed to work in a retail store you had to be available to work on holidays. 

One of the managers who was challenging to schedule was Peter, the Assistant Grocery Manager when I started. He was a rabid Husker fan and had season tickets, as well as attending several away games each season. At first this wasn't a huge problem, since the assistant grocery manager usually was scheduled on Sunday, with Saturday off. He turned down at least one opportunity for promotion to grocery manager in another store when he was adamant about having Saturdays off during the football season. Eventually he was promoted at Pine Lake. I honored his time off requests for every Saturday for the first year he was in that position, but after one season I announced that I would no longer accept time off requests, since it seemed like everybody wanted off on game day. He worked it out by switching shifts with another manager, but I never thought that he was committed to be a manager in a retail grocery store. Attending Husker games and playing golf seemed to be his main priorities. Otherwise he did a good job and was a key member of the management team, as long as there wasn't a football game conflicting with store priorities. 

In light of the post-Covid shift in the employee-employer power dynamic, it might seem like we were too tough on our employees when it came to scheduling and time off. Now, you hear a lot of people declaring that they aren't requesting time off, but informing their boss that they would be gone. Even now, I stand by my position that if you are going to work in a store that is busy on weekends and holidays, by accepting employment there you are agreeing to be available during the busy times. I think that the fact that the whole management team was there during the holidays, not taking advantage of their position or seniority, helped sell the idea that no one was getting vacation time approved during holidays. 

One of the most important things that I learned from Nick was that you did not run out of anything during the holidays, especially not "holiday" items or anything that was in the ad. During a holiday week we would make a list of everything we were out of first thing in the morning. We would start out by calling other Super Savers and Russ's to see if they had an extra that they could transfer. Then we would split up the list and head out to our competitors to buy as much as we could of the items that we needed. This procedure led to the case of the infamous Falklands Jalapeño-Pineapple Pancakes. I was sent to Hy-Vee with a mission to secure Bisquick, canned pineapple, and for some reason, jalapeño jelly on a snowy Christmas Eve. I had found all three items on my list, emptied the shelves, and headed up front to pay for them all. Now people who have never worked retail might think that this was a win for the store that was being raided -- they're making sales, right? But what's really happening is that their customers will be disappointed when they can't find these items on the shelf. (Hy-Vee used to try this with us just about every Sunday in order to replenish their ad items. After it happened once I refused to sell to them!) But anyway, back to Christmas Eve. As I stood in line, pushing a shopping cart full of just three items, I was starting to attract attention. Customers in line curiously asked me what I was doing with these seemingly mismatched products. I tried to deflect attention by telling them that I just got whatever was on the list, but that didn't satisfy them. Thinking fast, I told them that my wife was from the Falklands,  and every Christmas Eve, for our whole church, she made a Falklands delicacy -- jalapeño-pineapple pancakes! I made it out the door with my cases of mismatched breakfast food, and told the team back at the store about my adventure. The next two Christmas Eves I actually made jalapeño-pineapple pancakes for everyone to try -- surprisingly tasty -- and popular!