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As my first time posting here, 
, I figured that I should probably try to start off on the right foot and post the two stories that I remember the best from my time that I worked at the local grocery store.
Now then, to begin with I feel I need to give a bit of background about the place I worked at. This grocery store is a small family owned store, it only has three checkouts and 5 actual aisles with a small room in the rear of the store where they have nearly all the snack foods, excluding nuts and candy bars, and pops (or soda depending on your preferred nomenclature) in their own coolers, along with beer set off in a separate walk in cooler.
It was a nice small store and for the longest time it never saw any need at all for any cameras, perhaps part of the reason behind that would happen to be the rather close proximity of the local police station. It was literally within walking distance if they needed to be called.
Now something else about this store is that there are also three entrances to the backroom, one behind the coolers in the pop/chip room, one at the front of the store, and one behind the meat counter/butchers area. This comes into play later along with one fact.
I am unintentionally stealthy. The uniform at the time was a white shirt, black pants, black apron, and if I was cold then I would wear a red fleece vest which was allowed. To put it into more fun terms, I was a giant panda that could compete with ninjas for stealth. It actually got to the point where one day coworkers actually had me attach a string of bells to my belt to let them know I was coming, and it was a hilarious day where I think I managed to startled them at least 2 times that day since even with the bells, they still never heard me coming.
I do believe it hit its peak when I clocked in, let the lead cashier know I was there and then went around my duties, getting called up occasionally to bag. It wasn’t until lunchtime and I let the same fellow know I was clocking out that he expressed what appeared to be genuine surprise and told me, without any hint that he was joking, that he didn’t even know I was there that day.
Anyhow, onwards with the stories I can tell straight from the top of my head:
Pet Peeves
The first thing is my pet peeves that I gathered from my time working at the store, the major one being how careless people are. It’s a small shop, you could hold conversations with coworkers in a loud voice standing cattycorner in the store if you felt like it.
That didn’t stop crazy occurrences from happening.
One such time happened to be when I found a half unwrapped package of chicken breast sitting behind chips in our snacks/chips room. The thing that mostly boggled my mind wasn’t the fact that somehow it had managed to sit long enough to become room temperature, but the fact that just by stepping out of that small room and turning to the side, you’d go down the aisle with one entire side filled with meat and dairy product coolers. Goodness only knows what was going through that person’s mind at the time they discarded the product behind a couple bags of potato chips, but it sure as heck wasn’t a clue by four.
Then again, that wasn’t the worst warm thing that I found in that store. That honour would go to a box of spinach leaves that I dubbed Bob, if only because something that lived outside its environment for so long without being detected obviously had evolved some sort of sentience.
This package of spinach leaves happened to be one that you would find in the freezer section, barely larger than two decks of Bicycle playing cards and it had managed to sit on top of the freezer cabinets for long enough that not only had dust accumulated around and on it, but under the package was bare of dust. I think the only reason that it had managed to stay up there for so long is that the store would normally put things like diapers, Styrofoam coolers, and packages of paper towels lined up at the edge on top of the cooler blocking anyone from seeing further back where Bob there was hiding.
If someone asked me now, I’d swear I heard a scream of agony as it got pitched into the garbage can.
One of the other things that I hated about that job was the careless customers. I didn’t mind the few that would have a genuine accident or had a bad cart and couldn’t help it, but the ones that would knock into a display of wine and then just move on. That would take a long while to clean up and it would result in a good portion of the store being closed off while I tried to sweep up the glass shards in the wine before mopping it out.
At least I managed to learn how to sweep and mop up spills like that quickly, along with mint jelly. Goodness knows, but they always somehow managed to drop and break the jars of mint jelly and we’d have an aisle either smelling of rancid fruit or peppermints for a good long while.
Why would you even think that’s a good idea?
So the background I established previously here is somewhat important, especially noting that small area at the back of the store for all the snacks. This took place sometime in 2008 or so which means that I don’t quite remember what exactly was said by the members involved, but I do know the general gist of what was going on at the time.
Having only been there for around a year at that point, I was getting pretty comfortable with my job and it being during the final hour of the night, I had already done the sweeping and mopping and was policing the aisles of the store and facing the shelves. I had just finished taking care of the blind spot of the pop/chip room when the Person in Charge (PiC) told me to keep an eye on two people that had entered the store, a teenaged girl, possibly around 16 or 17 if I had to guess, and what appeared to be a boy, at a guess I would say 12-13 and the type where you’d label a future horn dog if you really had to stereotype.
Now this is where my stealth comes in. When asked to keep an eye on them, I probably could have taken one of the other routes into the back room so they wouldn’t notice me. Instead I just walked by them, made certain that everything was squared away in the room and then passed through the curtain separating the pop/chip room from the stock room and then stood behind the coolers in the stock room area and watched them through a hole in shelves that we had back there as well as a gap between the machines where I could have a better view. When they left the room I took another stock of things just to make certain and noted that there was a single tube of Pringles missing from when I had pulled them to the front.
So I did what any good employee should do and I told my PiC and she noted that while there was a tube of chips missing, neither the young lady nor the boy happened to be carrying one. Now this may have been chalked up to someone else having taken and bought it, excepting the fact that they were the only two customers in the store at that time. So she confronted the two and had the girl show her what happened to be in her purse.
Lo and behold it was a can of chips and she immediately claimed that she had bought it from the mini-mart down the road but she could not produce a receipt. Not having any of it, the PiC detained her and called the owners of the store to get their opinion on what to do and with the police showing up a couple minutes later, it was somewhat obvious what they chose to do.
So for around $2.50 this girl was probably going to be arrested for shoplifting and the boy was throwing insults every which way and led to one of the two exchanges that I recall from this incident.
Boy: *to me* You’re a fu***** liar! You liar!
Me: *shrugs* All I said was that before she went back there, there were a full row of chips. She left the room and there was one missing.
Boy: That’s a fu***** lie!
Me: Boy, if you want to hurt me, you’re gonna have to do a hell of a lot better than that.
Honestly, I wasn't trying to be as nonchalant as it sounds, the fact of the matter was that at this point I was at the end of a very long day and his pubescent attempts at insults just made me laugh to myself as I walked away to finish my work for the night so I could just go home. At any other point in time, I probably would have just been more servile, apologized insincerely and then walked away. But to hear the boy squawk, it was rather obvious at that point he was just trying to get brownie points from the girl for “sticking up for her”, hence the “horn dog” stereotype mentioned a few paragraphs above. But either way he slung a few more insults my way before leaving the store.
As for the girl, I don’t actually know what happened to her with any real certainty since the officer didn’t ask me to fill out any paperwork or give a statement. Mostly the police officer talked to the PiC about everything since she was the one that actually discovered the tube of chips in the young lady’s purse. To be honest, I always just figured that young lady just confessed that she shoplifted since she was escorted out by the police, but being where I was in the store, I couldn’t actually see if it was in cuffs or not and I had to go home before I even thought about asking my PiC what was going on.
Now normally in most tales that would probably be the end of things, but this may or may not have had a rarely heard of good ending as the next day while I was cleaning out and sanitizing the meat grinder the butcher uses, I get called to the front and who do I see but the boy there, and who I can only assume is his mother, or at the very least she was a serious maternal figure (MF).
MF: *To boy* Come on, apologize.
Boy: *Mumbles* Sorry. . .
Me: *Stares at with eyebrow cocked* For what?
*MF prods boy*
Boy: I’m sorry for cursing at you.
Me: Ok then, thank you for apologizing.
At that point, I left them without another word. I wasn’t trying to be rude to, please be aware of that. I just had to get back to getting the meat grinder cleaned up before the butcher went home and was therefore pressed for time. I still saw the boy around after that, normally with his maternal figure, but I don’t ever recall him looking me straight in the eye ever again. But that was one incident that I will always remember, even though the words might fade.
Wait, seriously? WHY?!
This is the other story that I will always think of when I think of my times working there. It’s the middle of July and it’s a fairly busy day. Now keep in mind that this store, for being so small, there’s only a single restroom with a single toilet inside for both the customers and the employees to share.
Well, around afternoon I’m doing my normal jobs and I go grab the keys to the cleaning cabinet as I could go and clean the restroom since no one had done so yet that day. Everything’s normal as I approach the door and open it up.
I stopped for a second and stared. I blinked a few times to make sure that I was actually seeing what I was seeing. After confirming it once more, I went to grab a PiC, different from the first tale.
Me: We’ve got a problem in the bathroom.
PiC: Uh oh, what’s the matter?
Me: Someone stole the handle off the toilet.
*Beat*
PiC: What.
Me: Someone took the flusher handle off the toilet. You better come take a look.
That’s right. It wasn’t a gross episode of someone playing Picaso with poop, thank god. Instead someone had come into the store, walked into the bathroom, and as it was just a regular toilet that you might find in your own home, they took the top off the tank and stole the handle and then walked right back out.
Now the problem here is that this is our ONLY bathroom. So we did what we had to and put a sign up stating the problem and myself or the PiC would go in occasionally to check up on the status and occasionally take the top of the tank off and flush it manually by lifting up the float and fiddling with the ballcock assembly. It continued that way until the owner managed to get in a new handle within the next couple days. After all, they couldn’t expect the employees to go without a bathroom hours on end
To this day, no one there has any clue why someone would want to steal a handle off the toilet, although my idea was the widest accepted. They just needed something to fix their own at home and were too cheap to actually buy one.
Those are the two stories that I know the best when I think back on my time at the store, along with the couple of pet peeves that I had with the occasional customer. I must say though that I do occasionally miss the time that I worked there.
, I figured that I should probably try to start off on the right foot and post the two stories that I remember the best from my time that I worked at the local grocery store.Now then, to begin with I feel I need to give a bit of background about the place I worked at. This grocery store is a small family owned store, it only has three checkouts and 5 actual aisles with a small room in the rear of the store where they have nearly all the snack foods, excluding nuts and candy bars, and pops (or soda depending on your preferred nomenclature) in their own coolers, along with beer set off in a separate walk in cooler.
It was a nice small store and for the longest time it never saw any need at all for any cameras, perhaps part of the reason behind that would happen to be the rather close proximity of the local police station. It was literally within walking distance if they needed to be called.
Now something else about this store is that there are also three entrances to the backroom, one behind the coolers in the pop/chip room, one at the front of the store, and one behind the meat counter/butchers area. This comes into play later along with one fact.
I am unintentionally stealthy. The uniform at the time was a white shirt, black pants, black apron, and if I was cold then I would wear a red fleece vest which was allowed. To put it into more fun terms, I was a giant panda that could compete with ninjas for stealth. It actually got to the point where one day coworkers actually had me attach a string of bells to my belt to let them know I was coming, and it was a hilarious day where I think I managed to startled them at least 2 times that day since even with the bells, they still never heard me coming.
I do believe it hit its peak when I clocked in, let the lead cashier know I was there and then went around my duties, getting called up occasionally to bag. It wasn’t until lunchtime and I let the same fellow know I was clocking out that he expressed what appeared to be genuine surprise and told me, without any hint that he was joking, that he didn’t even know I was there that day.
Anyhow, onwards with the stories I can tell straight from the top of my head:
Pet Peeves
The first thing is my pet peeves that I gathered from my time working at the store, the major one being how careless people are. It’s a small shop, you could hold conversations with coworkers in a loud voice standing cattycorner in the store if you felt like it.
That didn’t stop crazy occurrences from happening.
One such time happened to be when I found a half unwrapped package of chicken breast sitting behind chips in our snacks/chips room. The thing that mostly boggled my mind wasn’t the fact that somehow it had managed to sit long enough to become room temperature, but the fact that just by stepping out of that small room and turning to the side, you’d go down the aisle with one entire side filled with meat and dairy product coolers. Goodness only knows what was going through that person’s mind at the time they discarded the product behind a couple bags of potato chips, but it sure as heck wasn’t a clue by four.
Then again, that wasn’t the worst warm thing that I found in that store. That honour would go to a box of spinach leaves that I dubbed Bob, if only because something that lived outside its environment for so long without being detected obviously had evolved some sort of sentience.
This package of spinach leaves happened to be one that you would find in the freezer section, barely larger than two decks of Bicycle playing cards and it had managed to sit on top of the freezer cabinets for long enough that not only had dust accumulated around and on it, but under the package was bare of dust. I think the only reason that it had managed to stay up there for so long is that the store would normally put things like diapers, Styrofoam coolers, and packages of paper towels lined up at the edge on top of the cooler blocking anyone from seeing further back where Bob there was hiding.
If someone asked me now, I’d swear I heard a scream of agony as it got pitched into the garbage can.
One of the other things that I hated about that job was the careless customers. I didn’t mind the few that would have a genuine accident or had a bad cart and couldn’t help it, but the ones that would knock into a display of wine and then just move on. That would take a long while to clean up and it would result in a good portion of the store being closed off while I tried to sweep up the glass shards in the wine before mopping it out.
At least I managed to learn how to sweep and mop up spills like that quickly, along with mint jelly. Goodness knows, but they always somehow managed to drop and break the jars of mint jelly and we’d have an aisle either smelling of rancid fruit or peppermints for a good long while.
Why would you even think that’s a good idea?
So the background I established previously here is somewhat important, especially noting that small area at the back of the store for all the snacks. This took place sometime in 2008 or so which means that I don’t quite remember what exactly was said by the members involved, but I do know the general gist of what was going on at the time.
Having only been there for around a year at that point, I was getting pretty comfortable with my job and it being during the final hour of the night, I had already done the sweeping and mopping and was policing the aisles of the store and facing the shelves. I had just finished taking care of the blind spot of the pop/chip room when the Person in Charge (PiC) told me to keep an eye on two people that had entered the store, a teenaged girl, possibly around 16 or 17 if I had to guess, and what appeared to be a boy, at a guess I would say 12-13 and the type where you’d label a future horn dog if you really had to stereotype.
Now this is where my stealth comes in. When asked to keep an eye on them, I probably could have taken one of the other routes into the back room so they wouldn’t notice me. Instead I just walked by them, made certain that everything was squared away in the room and then passed through the curtain separating the pop/chip room from the stock room and then stood behind the coolers in the stock room area and watched them through a hole in shelves that we had back there as well as a gap between the machines where I could have a better view. When they left the room I took another stock of things just to make certain and noted that there was a single tube of Pringles missing from when I had pulled them to the front.
So I did what any good employee should do and I told my PiC and she noted that while there was a tube of chips missing, neither the young lady nor the boy happened to be carrying one. Now this may have been chalked up to someone else having taken and bought it, excepting the fact that they were the only two customers in the store at that time. So she confronted the two and had the girl show her what happened to be in her purse.
Lo and behold it was a can of chips and she immediately claimed that she had bought it from the mini-mart down the road but she could not produce a receipt. Not having any of it, the PiC detained her and called the owners of the store to get their opinion on what to do and with the police showing up a couple minutes later, it was somewhat obvious what they chose to do.
So for around $2.50 this girl was probably going to be arrested for shoplifting and the boy was throwing insults every which way and led to one of the two exchanges that I recall from this incident.
Boy: *to me* You’re a fu***** liar! You liar!
Me: *shrugs* All I said was that before she went back there, there were a full row of chips. She left the room and there was one missing.
Boy: That’s a fu***** lie!
Me: Boy, if you want to hurt me, you’re gonna have to do a hell of a lot better than that.
Honestly, I wasn't trying to be as nonchalant as it sounds, the fact of the matter was that at this point I was at the end of a very long day and his pubescent attempts at insults just made me laugh to myself as I walked away to finish my work for the night so I could just go home. At any other point in time, I probably would have just been more servile, apologized insincerely and then walked away. But to hear the boy squawk, it was rather obvious at that point he was just trying to get brownie points from the girl for “sticking up for her”, hence the “horn dog” stereotype mentioned a few paragraphs above. But either way he slung a few more insults my way before leaving the store.
As for the girl, I don’t actually know what happened to her with any real certainty since the officer didn’t ask me to fill out any paperwork or give a statement. Mostly the police officer talked to the PiC about everything since she was the one that actually discovered the tube of chips in the young lady’s purse. To be honest, I always just figured that young lady just confessed that she shoplifted since she was escorted out by the police, but being where I was in the store, I couldn’t actually see if it was in cuffs or not and I had to go home before I even thought about asking my PiC what was going on.
Now normally in most tales that would probably be the end of things, but this may or may not have had a rarely heard of good ending as the next day while I was cleaning out and sanitizing the meat grinder the butcher uses, I get called to the front and who do I see but the boy there, and who I can only assume is his mother, or at the very least she was a serious maternal figure (MF).
MF: *To boy* Come on, apologize.
Boy: *Mumbles* Sorry. . .
Me: *Stares at with eyebrow cocked* For what?
*MF prods boy*
Boy: I’m sorry for cursing at you.
Me: Ok then, thank you for apologizing.
At that point, I left them without another word. I wasn’t trying to be rude to, please be aware of that. I just had to get back to getting the meat grinder cleaned up before the butcher went home and was therefore pressed for time. I still saw the boy around after that, normally with his maternal figure, but I don’t ever recall him looking me straight in the eye ever again. But that was one incident that I will always remember, even though the words might fade.
Wait, seriously? WHY?!
This is the other story that I will always think of when I think of my times working there. It’s the middle of July and it’s a fairly busy day. Now keep in mind that this store, for being so small, there’s only a single restroom with a single toilet inside for both the customers and the employees to share.
Well, around afternoon I’m doing my normal jobs and I go grab the keys to the cleaning cabinet as I could go and clean the restroom since no one had done so yet that day. Everything’s normal as I approach the door and open it up.
I stopped for a second and stared. I blinked a few times to make sure that I was actually seeing what I was seeing. After confirming it once more, I went to grab a PiC, different from the first tale.
Me: We’ve got a problem in the bathroom.
PiC: Uh oh, what’s the matter?
Me: Someone stole the handle off the toilet.
*Beat*
PiC: What.
Me: Someone took the flusher handle off the toilet. You better come take a look.
That’s right. It wasn’t a gross episode of someone playing Picaso with poop, thank god. Instead someone had come into the store, walked into the bathroom, and as it was just a regular toilet that you might find in your own home, they took the top off the tank and stole the handle and then walked right back out.
Now the problem here is that this is our ONLY bathroom. So we did what we had to and put a sign up stating the problem and myself or the PiC would go in occasionally to check up on the status and occasionally take the top of the tank off and flush it manually by lifting up the float and fiddling with the ballcock assembly. It continued that way until the owner managed to get in a new handle within the next couple days. After all, they couldn’t expect the employees to go without a bathroom hours on end
To this day, no one there has any clue why someone would want to steal a handle off the toilet, although my idea was the widest accepted. They just needed something to fix their own at home and were too cheap to actually buy one.
Those are the two stories that I know the best when I think back on my time at the store, along with the couple of pet peeves that I had with the occasional customer. I must say though that I do occasionally miss the time that I worked there.
around here somewhere....
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