Mister Fiend wrote:Take a good chunk of Empath's vents about working in the deli department and slap my name on them, that will save time. But otherwise I'm enjoying being employed again. Except we can't have drinks in the deli.
Firstly, congrats.
Working sucks, but so does unemployment, and at least you have more interesting things to complain about.
TangentTime™ There's one old guy that comes by every few weeks and asks for salad "...and a rum'n'coke!"
I always replied to him with "out the parking lot, turn right, go straight through two traffic lights and the <liquor agency store> is on your left. You CAN buy the coke here, tho!"
(it does happen that you befriend some people over time) Best part is, a couple of years ago, the liquor agency decided to move that store
into an extension of OUR supermarket so I've since been saying "through the checkouts, hang a right and all the way to the end of the hall."
But back to the topic at hand: Remember that people are smarter than they appear - I believe that some weird and mild form of 'performance anxiety' affects them when you ask "Can I get you anything?" (often they'll ask the most inane questions with the most obvious answers, and when you bring them to realization, they invariably go "Oh, YEAH!" or "Of course!" or similar) Try not to give up on them too quickly (for all my snark and cynicism, I do still give a shit, more fool me)
Scott Adams (Dilbert creator) posed that people frequently lapse into and out of idiocy, due to the IMMENSE complexity of modern life and the inability of someone to be an expert on EVERYTHING.
As for my own deli experiences, it was a pretty good day with co-workers in relatively jovial moods that helped things go well.
We did have "Government Assistance" day yesterday (welfare cheques at the end of the month) so we've had a little more business than normal, and many more people asking questions on where this or that is (they don't shop as often).
...we did also have some of the chisellers - people who would grab something with an expiry date of tomorrow and ask to get it marked down (something we have been ordered to not do since April 27, 2006 - I remember the Head Office Memo
), and one woman.
She'd put an order (last minute and not giving the 24h notice which we request both on our order website and catalog
) for some wings. Not HOT wings, so the fry cook assumed she meant the frozen, precooked wings we reheat for the hot wings in the cafeteria and usual tray orders - we sell them at the same price 'un-reheated' in a pan you can pop straight into the oven and heat 'em up yourself.
No, that wasn't it.
We also take the leftover wings that didn't sell in the cafeteria, stick 'em in the cooler overnight and put them in cold plates the next day. The extras get packaged up cold in plastic clamshell containers and are sold a
little more cheaply. I thought I'd nailed it there!
No. She wanted us to cook wings, then chill them in the cooler for an hour or two
(nevermind that's insufficient time to cool them safely to below 40deg.F, and something we can get in trouble with the Health Department if we sell like that), package them in the foil pan, and YET
sell them for the 'bulk leftover rate'.
"Sorry, it doesn't work that way."
She went over me to the acting Acting Manager (our old Manager got promoted, our Assistant Manager has become Acting Mngr. ... and then she went on two weeks of vacation today
), who backed me up completely.
"...thus the Egregious Mooch has been foiled in her search for under-priced food, but she will hibernate and then return to the outside to continue her efforts in another month..."
The other thing is the labels/tags on our salad case got changed to match the whole 'Gourmet Minute' 'brand' the empty suits have gotten boners for. EVERYTHING, from pizzas to sandwiches to tossed salads to Chinese food - if we prepped it in-store, it's "Gourmet Minute-" whatever.
...and that includes the potato/macaroni/coleslaw/etc in our display case.
Now I do have a legitimate gripe; the new tags have smaller text due to the added words ("Potato & Vegetable" becomes "Gourmet Minute Potato Vegetable Salad" and have to squeeze in alongside a brand logo) and much of our clientèle is older (several nursing homes within a block or two, and the suburb was built in the Fifties), so it's really not working out well. Heck, *I* have trouble reading the five-digit scale code off the back of those tags!
This said? WHY ARE YOU SPENDING TWENTY FUCKING MINUTES EXAMINING ALL THE FUCKING SALADS?!? They're the
SAME DAMN SALADS as
LAST WEEK and the week before and so on for YEARS!!! I know you're not in here every day (well...actually some
are 
) but one would THINK you'd REMEMBER the types of salads YOU REGULARLY BUY!!!!!
I'd '/ragequit' right around now, but there's something I'd been shown a few days ago and I don't wanna procrastinate and forget it:
I work for
, founded by butcher John Sobey and nurtured by his son Frank (and antecedents) into one of the Big Two trans-national supermarket chains in Canada.
As you can see from the current company logo, the lettering is a little stylized (and has been like that for at least the last thirty years) Notice in particular that those 'S's look rather stylized and almost more like 'ornamental scroll-work' than actual letters....
Huh.
/Mal Reynolds
