.jpg)
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
Newly promoted from the ranks, I still thought like a stocker, even though I was responsible not only for getting displays built and the shelves stocked, but since we were open now, for customer service as well. Learning to think like someone who was in charge of the whole store was a mindset that would take time. Scheduling was my biggest headache. We had recently started receiving deliveries from two different warehouses, one which delivered on three days and the other on two different days. The warehouse that delivered on two days brought their load in the late morning, so I needed at least one person to come in and unload those trucks that would be stocked that night - fortunately we had such a large back room that leaving all those pallets in the back was no issue. The nights with no deliveries needed a small crew as well, to run back stock and to face the aisles. I now also had to schedule a cashier every night as well.
One of the things that I was learning about being a manager, even though it would be many years before I was able to articulate it, is that it's not a manager's job to do things, but to get things done. In other words, you can accomplish more as a manager by leveraging your staff's abilities and getting the most out of them by training them to be effective at their jobs, than you can by simply adding your own labor to the mix. Many managers believe that a "good" manager is one who works alongside the crew, demonstrating that they're one of them. While there are morale-boosting benefits to doing this, it's only part of the job. For example if I'm "working hard" stocking the soup aisle, I have no idea what's going on in the rest of the store. Is the new stocker properly trained? Are there lines up front which require opening up a second cash register? Is there shoplifting going on? Is there broken glass on the floor in the baby food aisle that needs to be swept up? All these things can get missed if the person in charge is concentrating on a small part of the job.
The store was situated on O Street, the main East-West arterial in Lincoln. Part of the parking lot was oriented so that you could sit in your car and watch the traffic go by, and keep an eye out for your friends as the drove by. We frequently had to go out into the lot and ask people to leave. For these discussions I often took two of my biggest and scariest looking stockers with me in order to emphasize the point! Although the part of town wasn't known as being especially rough, we still used to get trouble makers. Usually getting the entire stock crew lined up behind me dissuaded anyone from causing trouble. There was one night where things escalated before I could get backup and I was beaten up and had to go to the emergency room to get checked out. Around then I started taking Tae Kwon Do lessons after work with Von, one of my stockers.
At some point I received a promotion to the position of "third man" and worked some shifts during the day. I still ran the stock crew two nights a week, but worked first and second shifts the other three work days. In those days there were fewer departments and therefore fewer managers. There was a store manager, assistant store manager and meat and produce department managers. There was no bakery, deli or floral department. Cashiers were overseen and scheduled by the store manager. There was no customer service counter or back office. The manager in charge of each shift counted out drawers and tallied up the cash and checks at the end of the shift (hardly anyone paid with credit cards). The "third man" was kind of a fill-in, "gopher", position, responsible for ordering and filling the milk, keeping displays filled and covering for other managers on their days off, as well as working the second shift on occasion. Every Wednesday I substituted for Leonard, the Produce Manager. (it was during one of these Wednesdays that I discovered KZUM radio. I was working in the back room trimming lettuce and stumbled across Eli Rhoades' Jazz Fusion show).
About halfway through my four-year stint at Food 4 Less I was given a raise and transferred to the store at 48th and Pioneers. The Night Manager at that store was apparently doing a bad job, so I became the Night Manager. That store had not yet switched over to being open 24 hours, so I assumed that I'd be working a similar shift to the one when I first became Night Manager at 48th & O. I assumed incorrectly. I was expected to cover not only the overnight stocking shift, but the second shift, starting at 4:00PM! Of course this schedule motivated me to get the truck stocked as quickly as possible, since any hours past midnight were essentially working for free. At first this was difficult to achieve. I inherited an unnecessarily large crew, many who had restrictions that made scheduling difficult. Two high school kids who couldn't work past midnight and would just leave at 12:00 with their aisles half done; a professional bowler who was only available on Tuesdays when he wasn't bowling; other people who had been promised no weekend shifts; friends of the owner's son...it went on and on. Most of the crew were lazy and slow. My solution was to be a hard-ass.
By "being a hard-ass" I mean strict enforcement of the rules. I got rid of the slackers by writing up and firing people for no-call/no-shows, lateness, insubordination, and anything else I could think of to cull the herd. Little by little the ones who didn't want to do the job either were fired or quit and I was left with a core of people who wanted to be there and were great stockers. Around this time the store was switched to being open 24 hours and I started coming in at 9:00PM instead of 4:00PM; the pressure to get done by midnight went away. One of my top people was Lonnie, who was literally a rocket scientist with several advanced degrees. He was fast and accurate - I could depend on him to get a lot done each night. Lee was a student from New Hampshire who had worked for me at my previous store. Lee's nickname was "Complete Bastard", after one of the characters on The Young Ones. There was Rudy, who at least once a night would run down an aisle and slide on his belly the rest of the way when he was done stocking an aisle. On paper we didn't have enough people to get the job done, but every one of them was head and shoulders above the average stocker.
Then, as now, holidays were extra busy. One Thanksgiving Eve, when It was still starting at 4:00PM the lines stretched from the check stands to the back of the store. I'll never forget Ron, the Assistant Store Manager at the time, waving goodbye as he walked out in the midst of the chaos, leaving me to handle it. I swore that if I was ever in that position I'd never do that to anyone.
A situation that I didn't have to deal with at my other store was the friends of the son of the company owner. Jeff was about my age (I was under 30 at the time) and was a partier, as were his friends. On several occasions they would come in late at night and ask me to cash checks for them. Of course, if Jeff was there I'd have to do it, but his buddies would act like the store was their personal bank. I always refused and would predictably get showered with abuse. After I complained to the owner, it stopped.
Just because I had a great crew doesn't mean that we didn't occasionally get bad ones. We hired a guy named Tom who turned out to be one of the worst stockers I ever managed. After a few weeks Lonnie decided that he couldn't bear calling this guy the same name as me, so he renamed him "Erl". Where he came up with that name I'll never know, but it stuck. One of the things we did when running backstock was to put excess stock on the top of the warehouse shelving. Usually one stocker would stand up top while another would toss cases up to him. Erl frequently would toss boxes straight up only to have them fall back down and hit him in the face. Erl didn't last long. Another substandard stocker, Steve, decided that all of his problems were due to discrimination. I had to talk to him a number of times about working faster and he was catching flack from his coworkers who had to pick up the slack. One day he just didn't show up and we never saw him again. The next thing I knew we were being investigated by the Lincoln Human Rights Commission. Steve was a Native American. It may be hard to believe, but I had no idea that he was Native. Growing up I encountered a lot of different ethnic groups, but rarely Native Americans. So the idea that I was discriminating against him because he was Native American struck me as ridiculous. After the investigation started he stopped in one night to harangue me, calling me a "White Bastard". My crew started calling me "W.B." after that. We ended up being cleared of any wrongdoing. I'll never forget the answer that Lonnie gave the investigator when asked if I had ever demonstrated any prejudice in my dealing: "Nope, Tom just dislikes assholes".
One notable adventure involved mice. One night while taking a break at the front of the store we noticed a parade of mice marching along the back aisle! Now most people don't realize that any business that sells food is going to have some rodents, but this was an invasion! The store manager started paying a bounty to anyone who could catch a mouse. A few of the stockers made quite a few bucks.
Even though this wasn't what you'd call a rough neighborhood, we still had people coming in and causing trouble, usually teenagers. I never called the police on them, but chased them out and occasionally "escorted" them out physically. One such teenage boy returned with his father, who turned out to be a police officer. The father threatened and attempted to intimidate me, until one of the meat cutters, a huge man, walked out of the cutting room holding a large knife. That was the end of that.
As I mentioned in previous installments I had a violent streak in my younger days. One afternoon a belligerent customer shoved me during an argument. I grabbed him by the front of the shirt and threw him out (no punching involved). I didn't hear anything the next day, or the day after that, and assumed that nothing would come of it. It was an inventory weekend and on Monday morning I finished up the counting and filled in on a checkstand for an hour, something I normally did since the morning checker didn't come in until 7:00. When I went upstairs to collect my jacket I was fired. When I asked why he waited all weekend to fire me, Lyle, the store manager told me that he didn't have anyone else to run inventory and he needed me to check in the morning!
Since I hadn't burned any bridges after leaving the Omaha World-Herald I went straight to their office and asked for a job. Shannon, the office manager hired me on the spot for a part-time job. I then called Bud Trotter, who ran the floor cleaning service that cleaned and waxed Food 4 Less' floors. He also hired me on the spot. I was back to working two part-time jobs, but due to keeping good relations with a previous job, I was able to start work right away, with no intervening unemployment.
No comments:
Post a Comment