Lessons From a Grocery Store
by Brian J. Noggle
I didn't learn everything that I learned while I was at college in college. I spent four years and forty thousand dollars at Marquette University and got a B.A. in English and philosophy. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but that was before I looked in the classified ads to see how many listings there were for 'Philosopher Wanted.' Still, they were good years, and I learned a whole lot of what different people throughout different aeons thought and what other people thought about the things the different people thought and other things much less confusing. From somewhere in the literary anthologies and philosophy surveys, I got deluged by Theory about Metaphysics, Ethics, Aesthetics, and The Meaning of Life.
Fortunately, I worked at a grocery store to put myself through college. It taught me several things that the university professors and the views outside the classroom windows did. I knew why I was there, in the grocery store, at any given time of the day or night. The bursar knew, too. I learned what product it was okay to sell and why I should fill bags that say five pounds of potatoes with at least five pounds of potatoes. I even learned what a good shade of red was in a cut of watermelon, how pretty watermelons look when you have cut them along the star just right and no seeds show. Simple things in their own way, but Metaphysics, Ethics, and Aesthetics in their own right, in their own place.
Between the two vocations and between the catnaps that passed for a good night's sleep in those years, I wedded the theory with the practical, a step many philosophers and produce clerks have not made. I have taken the time to crystallize these observations into a few nifty one-sentence vignettes to memorize and tack on your refrigerator or to read and easily forget. These are some lessons I learned in a grocery store (or other retail outlet, as the case may be).
1. Always have something to fall back on.
The lights in the break room never seemed to all work at once, so it was dark one September evening at Gold's Shop Rite. I had just started my freshman year at Marquette, and I was a three month veteran of the grocery industry. The new assistant manager, a portly man named Dean, convinced Mike Fredericks, store manager, to hold a meeting for the baggers. The summer short-timers had shaken out, and around the crumby table in front of me a small core of baggers that would last a while waited in exuberance. Tim, a recent refugee from some other town, new to everyone in the city and somehow lonelier than all of us; Shawn, a flame-haired future high school drop-out whose hobbies were heavy metal music and piercing himself; Robert, a recently born-again Christian with energy that seemed barely contained in his small frame; Cortney, big enough to be named Cortney, a high school athlete; Earl, a thin, bespectacled young man that would follow his family into the Marine Corps as I had not mine; and me, a recent homecomer from Missouri with pretensions of "Poetry."
"Take pride in your work. You guys do a good job, and we want you to know what you do is important." Hard to convince seven guys at minimum wage that they were in a noble undertaking.
"It will always be something to fall back on." Over the years, I have seen many retirees come back to the grocery industry to supplement whatever pensions and "old people" incomes they receive. I myself have returned to produce clerkdom to pull myself out of debt.
College never afforded us that luxury. With the intensity of the new curricula, less time is spent on the liberal arts and more is spent focusing our graduates into one field, into one narrow path through life where deviation means confusion. Perhaps the Generation X experience of "Limbo"—or at least what glimpses I have seen in myself and driven off—is the feeling that if we don't get a good job in one narrow bandwidth of life we have failed.
Like an Existentialist Jesuit told my class, "Most of life is plan B." It helps to have a plan B, and if not specifically the grocery industry, then something to fall back on.
2. Touch the product.
When I first became a produce clerk, Chris stood next to me, both of us clad in our green aprons. Mine was a symbol of pride; his was a uniform. We were "culling the rack," checking each display of fruits and vegetables for bad merchandise. "Touch them all; touch them, feel them, become them," he said with mock Bodhisattva wisdom and baring his teeth in the peculiar Michels smile. "Only then can you cull the rack effectively."
Each morning I ran my fingers over all the waxy apple skins, among the tartly scented grapefruit, and over (and occasionally into) the dull tomatoes. When rotating the produce, I picked each peach and plum up individually and put them into place, ensuring less damage than what a later produce manager would call the "dump and run." When the deliveries of new product came in, I would wheel the skids—pallets— into the cooler and hand unload them, moving first the old product out of the way and then restacking them all by hand. It gave me a sense of knowing what the product was, what it looked like, and even a sense of accomplishment when it was done.
Too often I remember other, less manual jobs where I would deal with items and people I had never seen. People in New York assuring me that the product had left the Cleveland warehouse and that it should be in my warehouse even as we spoke. I would sweep a glance over the loading dock where I was standing and assure them it was not. The merchandise, someone in Dayton or Taipei's livelihood, was a flickering bit of light emitting diodes somewhere in New York. A little number.
"Why so many?" A purchaser asked, several years beyond my first grocery store. We were standing in the cramped loading dock of an art supply store, my arms resting on a manual pallet jack. She gestured a lithe arm at the four oversized skids of foamboards. Our loading dock held six skids of product comfortably, with room to move carts and ourselves. I had left the other seven skids, one a double-size with four by eight foot sheets of foamboard on it, out on the concrete loading dock.
"That's what you ordered." I shrugged as she flipped pages on the purchase order and found the number of sheets she ordered. "Fourteen hundred. Four bins of three hundred and fifty."
I'm sure it looked a lot simpler on the computer screen when she typed it in. Fourteen hundred is four keystrokes and a return. Fourteen hundred foamboards is one hundred and twenty eight cubic feet. Something she remembered for three months, until it was time to order it again. Something I and the others who sell it and move it every day take for granted.
I am not above it. The first produce order I wrote, several years ago, was a bit large. The produce manager took a week's vacation, and I wrote the order for a Saturday load and was in the process of moving it around when I checked the order book. It was only ones and twos in the book, with an occasional four or ten, but when it was totaled, it was a four hundred piece load. Almost twice the necessary amount for an average summer weekend. Almost too much for a green green grocer to handle. But I managed, and I remembered that little ticks in the book add up to lots of cases in the cooler, lots of cases of perishables in the cooler.
3. Remember the people.
William, third grade, liked to help me fill the rack whenever his mother shopped at the store. He told me in his many visits of his preference for comic books with Wolverine in them and his performance on recent math tests.
Val, a highly educated woman with a gravelly voice always shortened my name to "Bri," her current husband's name. She was a discriminating produce buyer and knew the seasons better than I did.
"Swivel-hips." Someone in the store designated the red-haired lady that because she did not pivot at the waist. She always asked for help buying good grapes for her mother and lived her life on the sixty-seven bus line. I often saw her waiting for it going one way or the other.
There are more faces than names, the customers in the various stores I have worked in. Each of them has different preferences and different experiences.
"Cut these down and put them on the floor. They'll buy them." One of the in absentia owners pointed at scraps of paper to be bundled and priced. I didn't care to ask who "they" were or why "they" would want to by assortments of mismatched color papers. I doubted if he knew.
Too often this happens in the retail industry. The marketing department, or the meat department manager, or even the stocker remembers there is a target audience or a generic customer, and the abstraction takes over for individuals. It happens in other circumstances, too, when we stereotype individuals by their occupations or positions in life. A certain amount is inevitable, given the small snapshot of attention and time we can give to any one person, place, or idea these days, but it helps to keep the individual in mind. Not for some strange esoteric "we-are-all-brothers-and-sisters" forced-fraternity, but because we might miss out on some interesting and personal contact. Something too often missing in the flurry of modern existence.
Besides, if you don't know who "they" are, you might not know that they don't need multi-colored trinkets.
4. Don't waste time covering your arse.
As trite as it is, there's a lot to do and life is short. It's not so bad when you're in a store and you know when your shift is over. You can pace yourself to get everything you want to do and need to do done. Life doesn't afford us that luxury. We need to make the most of time. Covering yourself and hiding your mistakes wastes precious time.
"Who threw all those greens out?" Number Two asked. My second produce manager blinked his expansive blue eyes at me from his low height.
I stopped from stacking the bags of onions into a display and wiped my hands on the edge of my apron. "That's a silly question. I did." There were only two of us working in the department.
"Why?"
"They were rotting in the cooler." The smell had been driving me crazy for days. He proceeded to tell me how his gross profit margin would be affected and all the other good reasons I should not have thrown them out.
He did give me every opportunity to avoid it, though. I could have answered that I didn't know; I could have made lengthier explanations and excuses. Either way, I would have wasted time trying to avoid the consequences of my action. I leave the excuses and the innuendo dances to the people in the front office.
I don't claim some sort of produce omniscience, either. I make mistakes, too. Like wetting leaf lettuces and cabbages from a water bottle where a ten percent bleach solution has replaced pure water. When I found out what happened, I pulled all the cabbage and leaf lettuce and threw them out. I rinsed the rack and filled it with fresh product. Time spent on making excuses, pleading innocence or ignorance, or bemoaning error could be better spent on fixing them or just going on. Some of us have to work for a living and live for a lifetime.
5. Earn respect.
The man's name was Rob (I later found out). Fresh from some college, and Sheridan's was his next success in the making. Full of bold new ideas and plans. He lasted a month as an assistant manager before leaving for less resistant pastures.
The reason? He thought his rank would grease the wheels to his ideas about dairy and frozen marketing and his idea of proper dairy facing. A stocker "facing" pulls one of each dairy product forward on the shelves to give the illusion of fullness; "double facing" means two of each item. Triple facing is time consuming, and no assistant manager is going to convince employees to triple face consistently on title alone.
Rob had not been around long enough for us to get to respect him as a person and a leader; he expected the title to carry him. Unfortunately, we live in an anti-authoritarian age where we grant no such luxury to our leaders. When Rob presented his ideas straight away and expected instant compliance, we resented him. Too bad for him; he went his way, unremembered by most.
Mike M., a store assistant manager at a small Missouri grocery store, never rolled up his sleeves that I can honestly recall, but I imagine him so. He would help face the aisles, pick up the floor, and stack charcoal--heavy work, and something we noted. And respected. He was one of us with more power. What he said we did, not only because he was the Assistant Manager, but because he was Mike M.
Don't get me wrong, we did what Rob told us, but only when he told us and as haphazard as we could within his guidelines. With Mike we took the extra steps and kept a lookout for things to do above what he told us. Mike mattered; his opinion of us mattered. Rob did not.
6. People are people.
It was the beginning of the spring semester of my senior year, the Wisconsin winter quite crisp outside. To fulfill the requirement for a class in social philosophy, I was huddled in the darkness of the Weasler Auditorium receiving diversity training. Someone on stage, tiny and glowing under the spotlight like an actress, was teaching me to be sensitive to minorities. Then, on a distant screen, she showed us a movie.
I have worked with people all my careers. When it comes to race, creed, and sex, I have worked with all of them. I have learned that people are people regardless of factors assigned on them arbitrarily by nature. Some are fools, some are not very smart, some are lazy; it is true, and there are members of minorities every but as lazy as majorities. Unfortunately for racists and other ists everywhere, there are some people smarter, heartier, and better looking than others. You can't tell merit by looking at people.
I learned by working with people like Lenardo, Earl, Shannon, Cindy, Renee, Mary, Shawn, and so on, that people are people. I dealt with them every day, which gave me a far better education in people sensitivity than four years of college could—particularly when the minorities were pinned and wriggling on a little stage, on a movie screen, or in abstract statistics.
7. Finesse it up when you can.
Tom, dark haired and brandishing a little mustache that would have been the pride of any Mediterranean lover, backed through the swinging door into the produce room and pulled his cart with him. "I always take the last fifty minutes of my shift and grab what I need to fill and then I finesse it up."
"Finesse?" I asked. I was still in the blue vest that denoted my station in the store. I was a bagger for a few weeks yet. Tom was leaving, and I was designated the produce heir-apparent. I sneaked over between bagging, carts, and before I started to face the store and finish the night.
"Straighten it up, make what you can't fill look like it's full. Finesse," he said with a stage accent and a sweep of the arm before he backed out of the fluorescent light of the produce room into the darkness of the cooler.
Too often people associate finesse with smoothies and con men who don't really work or do anything substantial. That's not what either Tom or I meant. The rack was full on the floor—outside the insulating doors and where the customers could see all the glory and all the flaws. The level of fruits and vegetables was even under the mirrors. It would last the night and when Mike, the produce manager, arrived in the morning, all he would have to worry about would be the product coming in tomorrow. Tom showed me how to let the extremely perishables run and how to make them look full. Less greens would go limp and make their way to the dumpster.
Finesse is the art of doing it right and making it look easy. It isn't easy, and it is by no means common. I have worked in places where the idea of doing something simple is to throw labor at it. To clean a loading dock by giving three guys a broom and a dustpan. Hardly cost effective, and it will take those three guys almost as long as it would take one person to do it. Finesse is an individual characteristic, spurred by that individual's pride in himself.
In real life it is as easy as keeping yourself combed and trimmed. Putting on a lady's coat. Giving your hat a roll in your hand before jamming it on your head. Speaking crisply, without accent or semantic misuse. None of it is as important as the substance of what is said or who you are, but a touch of finesse never hurt.
So the great revelations outlined above don't mesh into an all-encompassing philosophy that will lead to universal harmony and the triumph of reason. Because they rise from the day-to-day, they turn concrete experiences and observations into abstractions applicable to other cases. The tidbits are true, however, and can lead to a slightly happier and a bit more secure existence at best, or at the very least you can become a more effective bagger-slash-produce clerk.
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Brian J. Noggle
Prose Sampler