Wanderings through the Supermarket

Have you ever worked in retail? It’s not fun.

Though I’m young, I’ve been psychologically deprived as a minimum-wage stock worker of supermarkets since my first steps out of high school. At my graduation, the principal stood before the entire student body in our caps and gowns and reminded us of the words that hung on the banners of every classroom, Prep Today for Success Tomorrow.

But I didn’t prep the way I needed to, so there I was a few months later, stocking shelves part-time in a supermarket while mindlessly taking classes at the nearest community college.

I would watch the clock tick by, waiting for those shifts to end. And thankfully, the clock kept ticking and I was freed from the bonds of that retail nightmare (though I landed right in the jaws of the second-level of Hell; otherwise known as the Plane of the Eternal Retail Industry) when the corporate behemoth that signed off on my paychecks went bankrupt due to its own avarice.

Last weekend, I was mindlessly roaming through Stop & Shop as my mother struggled to decide if we needed regular breadcrumbs or Panko breadcrumbs. My wanderings led me to an aisle where a manager was schooling a young recruit in the ways of stocking a shelf. Pretending to peruse a shelf of Egg Noodles, I turned my ear and listened to the re-education of this young, apathetic soul to the rhetoric of retail.

Supermarket managers manifest in a variety of ways: there is the plucky youth who got the promotion after years of dedicated work in the lower rungs of retail, whose soul was dashed against the shiny laminated floors of the corporate establishment until a porter was called to clean up spilled aspirations and dreams in Aisle 8. There is also the frustrated, bereaved individual who had been a part of the deprived and poorly oiled machine that became a zealot to the inhumane entities that command it. This manager was of the latter sort, arms flailing as he went over Customer Service guidelines and Mystery Shopper expectations. Then, he asked a question that immediately brought to mind my own indoctrination into the Church of the Broken Spirits.

“Have you heard of the three-R’s?”

All he was met with was a shrug, a truthfully obvious and silent “no.”

“Rotation. Rotation. Rotation.”

My manager sang this godless hymn to me on my first day of work. Rotation is the act of putting newer product behind the older product on the shelf, avoiding the loss of profit the store would receive if product isn’t sold before its expiration date. Rotation. Rotation. Rotation. It was like a drum beating out of rhythm, rattling around your mind and pushing everything else out.

I watched this young shelf-stocker intently, because that’s all you are to the grocery chain; an able body who’ll fill the shelves up and show up Christmas morning because you need this job once the holidays are over and you were sorely reminded that you (like the product itself) could be easily replaced. Rotation. Rotation. Rotation.

He complied with his new overseers’ commands and received a brusque nod of approval, the assertion that “You aren’t as incompetent as you can be,” the et al. of compliments I’ve heard during my own tenure as a shelf-stocker.

The manager stood with arms folded, watching quietly as his newest peon tore open box after box and packed the shelves nice and full. “Pop quiz,” the manager said, laughing. It was a cruel laugh — not a joyous uproar that poured forth from the throat or the lungs — it came from the depths of his aching body after years of stacking pallets onto an ice-cold truck at the end of a long shift. It rattled through the air, like something was caught in his throat and was scratching at his gray, cracked lips every time it peaked out. “What are the three-R’s?”

“Rotation. Rotation. Rotation.” It was with hesitance the words were repeated back.

I was transfixed for a moment, as though it was the summer after my high school graduation and I stood with my resume in hand waiting to speak to a manager about applying for a job. If I could, I’d tell myself in that moment that it wasn’t the end of the line for me.

Time would move forward and I’d be able to proudly and happily give my boss 2-weeks notice one day. Rotation.

I started the job August 10th, 2013, two days after my 18th birthday. My last day was August 10th, 2015, when I turned 20. Rotation.

If only I could have told myself that even then I was prepping myself for a successful tomorrow. Rotation.

But life just rolls on by. We don’t have the luxury of seeing it in retrospect but it doesn’t mean we can’t appreciate how far we’ve come.