Tales from the Granary
Reading (The Customer Is) Not Always Right is sending me on a wicked nostalgia trip to my first "real" job, as a cashier at a natural foods store my senior year of high school.
To set the scene: The place where I worked was one of a (then) local chain. This was in the days before Whole Foods, and we were one of those places so organic we didn't even have a barcode scanner--we had to price everything by hand, and when we rang things up, we had to enter everything manually. On the other hand, cashiers started at a full dollar and a quarter above minimum wage, and no one cared about my nose stud or M's ponytail, so as high school shit jobs go, it was one of the less soul-crushing I've heard of. Except for upper management, the store was staffed mostly with high school students and New College kids.
The other thing that put my job heads and tails above what most of my friends (the ones who didn't also work at this place) had was that at this store, the management was firmly on the side of the staff. Early on in training, the front-end manager who was teaching me to work a cash register told me, "You don't get paid enough to have to deal with assholes. If a customer's being a jerk, call a manager." It's also one of a few places where I've seen managers tell off rude customers.
Having management with backbone was important, because our store attracted a pretty motley crew of alien abductees (and alien descendants, who posted fliers for their support group on our bulletin board); laissez-faire granola moms who stared into space and talked in vague, glowing terms about the undisciplined little shits we were prying off shelves and out of bulk bins; armchair fad nutritionists; and, because of where we were located, most of Sarasota's surprisingly large Amish community.
Poll Choose Your Own Natural Food Adventure!
To set the scene: The place where I worked was one of a (then) local chain. This was in the days before Whole Foods, and we were one of those places so organic we didn't even have a barcode scanner--we had to price everything by hand, and when we rang things up, we had to enter everything manually. On the other hand, cashiers started at a full dollar and a quarter above minimum wage, and no one cared about my nose stud or M's ponytail, so as high school shit jobs go, it was one of the less soul-crushing I've heard of. Except for upper management, the store was staffed mostly with high school students and New College kids.
The other thing that put my job heads and tails above what most of my friends (the ones who didn't also work at this place) had was that at this store, the management was firmly on the side of the staff. Early on in training, the front-end manager who was teaching me to work a cash register told me, "You don't get paid enough to have to deal with assholes. If a customer's being a jerk, call a manager." It's also one of a few places where I've seen managers tell off rude customers.
Having management with backbone was important, because our store attracted a pretty motley crew of alien abductees (and alien descendants, who posted fliers for their support group on our bulletin board); laissez-faire granola moms who stared into space and talked in vague, glowing terms about the undisciplined little shits we were prying off shelves and out of bulk bins; armchair fad nutritionists; and, because of where we were located, most of Sarasota's surprisingly large Amish community.
Poll Choose Your Own Natural Food Adventure!