The Supermarket Food Chain

During my junior year of college most of my friends spent their free time and breaks getting wasted. I spent mine working as a grocery cashier at Price Chopper. I drove home almost every weekends for work. I could have worked at the one in Utica near my school, but Utica kind of scared me. It had so many closed factories, and the only working one manufactured other abandoned factories.* Yep, the abandoned factory market was booming in Utica circa 2005.

Now growing up, I had always believed that people are genuinely thoughtful intelligent beings. My time at Price Chopper of course confirmed this and also showed me a tremendous work ethic in others that I now aspire to. There were however some oddities in people’s behavior that might be worth mentioning.

Perhaps most noticeable were those individuals that purchased several tabloids on a daily basis (Or as I affectionately called them, ‘crazies’). I found it astonishing that a woman knew Jennifer Aniston’s blood type, but not her own. Even more awkward was one fellow who would buy a TV guide program every week. One day I asked him, “So what shows do you enjoy watching?” I was then informed that he didn’t actually have cable, he just liked to know what he was missing.

Another thing that always struck me as odd, was how obsessed married women were with believing that every man who talked to them was hitting on them. This often led to awkward situations when a man in line would try to strike up a conversation with one of these taken ladies. I can’t recall any particular such dialogue, but they usually went something like this:

MAN: “Hi, do you have the time?”
WOMAN: “I’M MARRIED!”
MAN: “Yes, I see the ring. I also notice that you have a watch and was wondering if you could…”
WOMAN: “BACK OFF PERVERT! I HAVE A HUSBAND!”

While working at Price Chopper I found that I had a natural gift for the profession (I can count), and was quickly promoted to font-end-shift-supervisor. What this means is that instead of staying behind a register all day, complaining that the supervisors never did any work and were huge tight-asses, I got to stand around telling the cashiers what to do and yell at them for no good reason. I soon found myself looking forward to work.

After a while though, I found that yelling at the cashiers was much more effort than I was willing to put forth and sought for more effective lazier means of ordering them around. I stopped shouting at my worthless underlings, and began asking them in confidence to do tasks,. I always made sure to say that I needed them to do it because they were one of the few individuals that I could trust to complete the task properly. Soon I was no longer the object of anyone’s anger. All the motivated workers blamed the lazy ones. And all the lazy ones loved me because I never asked them to do extra work.

But I still had to bother asking people to do things, and this greatly cut into my chatter time and loitering plans. It’s then that I realized that while I loathed and was generally disturbed by my thirty plus male coworkers that hit on the teenage girls working there, perhaps there was a lesson to be learned here. After all, when a sweaty man twice your age smiles at you it’s creepy, but if it’s your supervisor and he’s maybe four years older than you, then he’s just being nice.

Though it wasted quite a bit of my allotted day-dreaming time, I began telling jokes to the female cashiers, and pretended to learn their names (name tags are a wonderful thing). Soon I had each young lady thinking that she was indeed my favorite, and that work on the front end would be so much easier if more employees tried harder like them. After a while I soon found that with a quick smile and feigned laughter I could convince the largely female sixteen-year-old work force to volunteer to do difficult tasks without any other provocation. Success!

Then disaster struck. I had made the front end so effective when I supervised that soon the head front-end-shift-supervisor Mark began asking me to take more hours. Whenever someone needed to take a day off, or a shift needed filling, Mark would call me up. “Hey Drew. I know this is kind of last minute, but we really need somebody to supervise this afternoon. Chris called in sick. I don’t know if he’s actually sick. Why can’t people just show up on time like you?”

I of course would take the shift. After all, it’s nice when somebody notices that you’re working hard, even if it does just mean that you end up working harder. Sometimes when there was a slight overlap in supervisor scheduling, Mark would ask me to bring the garbage back to the compactor or empty the bottle machines. He’d say that he couldn’t trust these younger cashiers to not slack-off in the back, and made me feel like out of all the supervisors, I was his favorite. I decided to quit before he started smiling and winking at me.

* No, it didn’t actually make other abandoned factories.