The Grocery Store

This could be any grocery store or at least parts of it that people can relate to. It’s full of rather odd characters to some but may be normal to other people.

The Dairy manager is a chain smoker of biblical proportions. Before entering the store each morning he finishes off a cigarette he just lit while getting out of his truck. He is a busy worker who is great at his job but nearly every hour he can be found standing in the front of the store smoking a cigarette. Doesn’t matter he has a pallet of dairy items sitting out on the sales floor or having the dairy cooler wide open, his nicotine fix comes first.

And Lord help the person who takes his cart out of the cooler. He will literally complain to everyone in the store about his cart being stolen. He even wrote his name on the cart so as to quickly identify it in case the overnight stock crew uses it without his permission. Which he would never give. Again friendly to all the customers but cross him and he wouldn’t give you the time of day if your life depended on it.

The stock crew is still alive. The majority of them are drug addicts who only work to earn enough money to buy drugs.  During the night they play gangster rap music over the stores PA system using a cell phone. It’s ease to know when they will go on break. While the music is playing, the phone will chime in notifying them of a text message. A minute later about three of them are heading outside to take a break as a car pulls up to talk with them. Something is exchanges between them as the car leaves and they come back in after they have a smoke.

But they too are hard workers. They spend at least eight hours working on the same isle all night. So by morning as the store opens up they are quickly walking out the door leaving a few others to finish the rest of the stocking. The remaining members of the stock crew consist of former assistant managers who got busted down for not brown-nosing enough or they didn’t fit into the company model of “doing what they are told to do even if it’s wrong”.

The Scan Analyst has just returned from maternity leave. She just gave birth to another child for this year. I’m not saying she has a lot of kids but the last time she took her family grocery shopping they had to use a school bus to get everyone to the store. She is still unmarried but dating when she has any free time. After all, her oldest kids can babysit the younger ones.  As for her job skills, let’s just say she always have plenty of tags left over at the end of the day as with no signage on a majority of the displays.

The Produce Department and the Meat Department is about the only sane area of the whole store. It’s also the ESPN center as well as the gossip corner for all manner of conversation.  If someone did something wrong or there was a sport related event, these guys would know all the details before anyone else would.

The Deli Department can be summed up with this. The Deli manager needs to shave her beard and mustache.  And don’t ever eat the food. Ever.

The Frozen department is currently run by an assortment of employees. There is one guy on it but the area is so heavily shopped that he can’t keep it full stocked up.

The cashiers are the run of the meal type. Elderly ladies, young teenager girls or teenage boys hoping to get off the registers and on with the stock crew. One cashier in particular is still having a real up and down life. He was on the stock crew and then became the dairy manager. He got so lazy at it while bragging about his girlfriend that he was demoted to cashier. His girlfriend dumped him for being as she put it, “A total loser”. He’s paying child support and dreams of making it to the big time as a musician while playing his harmonica in front of the store at night.

The receiver is great to work with. She gets along with all the vendors and store personnel. She works a second job at night at a local diner. And to hear her life stories comes with a NC17 rating. Let’s just say she use to have lots of boyfriends and she can hold her liquor. Her life story could make an interesting TV show on the white trash/playboy channel.

And Management, well they’re trying. The store manager just left the store. Gave up and went back to becoming an assistant manager at another store. But while he was the manager he nearly killed everyone else there. He would always micro-manage everyone. He goes around and writes down everything he wanted done in that department for that day, and then checks to make sure it‘s completed before they went home for the day. All the while he would stay in his office or hang out in the Produce department talking like a motivational speaker on one of those infomercials.

The assistant manager who recently came to the store feels like he is in way over his head. He has to cleanup a backroom full of grocery items that has yet to be stocks, build displays and fill up end-caps of items that was to have been built days ago. All the while finish everything on the manager’s to-do list and take care of the normal store activities.

There is a temporary assistant manager who came to the store when the manager left. He is trying as hard as he can to get out as quick as he can. Too much work and is already stressed out for the amount of work he has to do every day.

The night time manager is basically trying to date every young female cashier that he can. At the same time he is trying to do as little work as possible. He does hang out with members of the stock crew at night as he joins them from time to time for a quick break in front of the store.

This could be every grocery store someone had or is currently working in. These people are real and there are more stories about these people but not for underage kids to read.