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!
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