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.
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