23
While we weren't the first grocery store at the south end of town, we
were the largest and thus able to offer lower prices than the much
smaller grocery store nearby, so our large Home Depot sized grocery
store was making money hand over fist into the Summer of Nineteen
Eighty-Five. Plans were being made for the owning Svenson family to
build and open up a second location at the north end of town. While
these stores were warehouse sized stores, we still had normal sized
stock and shelves. Kind of the best of both worlds... Then the
competition came.
Another start-up grocery store chain in the same style as ours was
being built and opened up by the Summer, but it was two and a half
miles away and when they opened we hardly noticed the impact. As we
had been first, our store had established the customer draw to our
area and our side store spaces had all been filled-up, including a
hardware store, and a fast food chain had opened at the far end of
our parking lot along with a 'SwiftCare' branch location. We were
the place to be and that's how our next competitor saw it, too,
eying the empty field directly across the street.
Our chilled section of the store, which included dairy and frozen
foods, had started out with our department head, Butch, plus one of
the Svenson family nephews from Minnesota, and then the six of us who
had started the weekend before opening. The six of us were all
part-timers, as our hours were under thirty a week, but soon one left
within the first few weeks and two more were gone by Spring. Rather
than replace all three, the rest of us had our hours expanded to fill
the gap with only one new employee hired to help cover the hours.
Typically, four of our group would be working when the truck loads of
groceries arrived in the early hours of the morning so we could more
quickly empty the boxes and clear the aisles by eight in the morning.
The remaining two would cover afternoon and evening hours which
mostly entailed keeping the milk shelves filled and any special or
other fast selling item topped-off throughout the day. As our hours
expanded, I again had to remind Butch of my nighttime classes and
existing Saturday computer job at the Business College. He thought
he'd express his displeasure of having to schedule around these by
giving me fewer hours than the rest, but it was only less by about
two or three hours which was easily made up for with my eight hour
Saturday job.
By August, a major chain grocery store was being built across the
street from us, it was expected to open in time for the holiday
season and, unlike our store, it was also unionized. I
don't know if it was a coincidence or the major chain grocery store
encouraged it, but the grocery workers union suddenly decided to
organize our store. They first had representatives discover each
employee's home address and visited us at home to warm us up to the
idea of forcing our employer to become a unionized store, by
September the Svenson family caught onto this and began lobbying the
employees against it. They placed their plans to complete a second
location on hold and the friendly, collaborative atmosphere between
the family and us employees soon soured.
Butch decided to pass-on his displeasure by insisting I work any and
all hours and force me to quit College and my associated Saturday
job. When I told him College was my first priority, he apparently
didn't want to fire me, but would instead reschedule my hours to be
tightly against my college hours. Having me work the afternoon shift
until five thirty, then I'd have to go straight to classes in my work
clothes at six.
His attempted coup de grรขce
was realizing I didn't have classes on Friday evenings so he
scheduled me to work Friday evenings, then had me come back five
hours later in the wee hours of Saturday morning to help with the
weekend truckload until it was time for me to go to the school and
work my eight hour Saturday shift. Still I refused to give up my
computer monitoring & tutoring job and was only given fifteen
minutes to leave from the grocery to get to the school. What made
this stunt silly was that having me come in so early on Saturday
morning meant I was there two hours before the truck arrived with the
new stock. As I had topped-off the rest of the shelves from back
stock during my Friday evening shift, there was nothing for me to be
doing with my return to work five hours later and so I would buy
myself a microwavable breakfast and spend the first hours in the
breakroom waiting for the truck to arrive. Butch wasn't going to
come in that early in the morning himself to make sure I was fussing
with the shelves, he'd just checked my time-card three hours
later when he got in to make sure I'd punched-in at the scheduled
time. Once the truck load arrived, I'd pull out the pallets to the
various cases and they'd be in place with me having started on the
frozen foods when the other employees came in with Butch. Sure
enough, with this scheduling stunt, I was exhausted by the time I got
to the Business College for my Saturday hours, but taking a few NoDoz
pills helped me muddle through the hours on those days.
By late September, the union had organized enough of the workforce to
demand a unionizing vote at the store and the Svensons, as we found
out later, pocketed all the cash they could get out of the store just
before the vote. Their plan was to simply close the store and
walk away once the Union won. For the first time since the
opening weekend eleven months earlier, all of us employees were in
the store at the same time. The ballot box was in the middle of an
open space at the back half of the store aisles where it could be
clearly seen by both the Svensons and the Union Representatives as
the votes were cast. One by one, we were to walk up with plenty of
space between us to write down our vote on a slip of paper and
carefully slip it into the box with one hand so all could see
multiple votes weren't being stuffed in. Once the voting was done,
the box was opened and the votes counted.
The store wasn't
going to be unionized and the Union Reps walked out of the store
stunned. But no more stunned then the Svensons who had pockets full
of the store's operating money and yet still had a store to
operate. All they had to do was take that money out of their
pockets and put it back into the store's safe and bank account.
... that's all they had to do.
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