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Once the bankruptcy court had sorted out the grocery store's finances
and gotten it back into profitable working order, they were able to
sell the store to pay-off the remaining debts. The new owner was an
''investor'' who lived up in Wyoming and wanted to get into the
grocery store business. While he, himself, never came to the store,
as far as we employees knew, he sent one of his trusted
associates to come down to Colorado and handle the store on his
behalf. I find his name wasn't memorable to me so I'll call him
'Bud'.
Bud's goal was to get the store into working order, which he was a
bit late for as the interim court appointed management had done a
good job at that already. But not so in the eyes of
Bud and the first thing he did was make sure each person was assigned
a specific set of shelves so he could hold them personally
accountable for any issues he felt existed. He assigned these based
on simplistic criteria. Whereas we would all chip in within our
departments, and sometimes across our departments, to get our
truckloads broken down and filled into the shelves, now a person was
assigned to an aisle. You wanted to be the stocker assigned the
paper aisle as your defined section given how large and light the
stock was and fast to get on the shelves. You didn't want to be the
stocker assigned the canned vegetable aisle given the small size of
each item to be placed on the shelves and the need to rotate it. If
you were, you were given the same time as the guy in the paper aisle
to get your stock put up and if you didn't, you'd
be written up. If the paper guy finished early and went to help
you with the canned veggies, he'd be written up for working
outside of his assigned area. On the other hand if the paper guy
finished early and took an extended break until the end of his shift,
well that was his reward for doing such a good job. Paying
someone to sit around and kill time is a good
thing, having the veggie aisle finished more quickly so
the customers wouldn't trip over the remaining boxes when they came
in during the morning, a bad thing.
You do the math.
In the case of our frozen food & dairy department, the four of us
were cut in half. The department head and I were assigned the
diary stock and the other two the frozen food cases. Originally, two
of us would come in for the truck load times to first put up the
frozen food stock before it melted, then we'd get a start on the
dairy stock. The department head would take the daytime hours and
work on the remaining dairy stock until the fourth guy came in for
the evening hours to finish off anything left. But now as we had to
have one person cover the morning hours, we two truck load guys
were assigned to come in hours after the truckload arrived, leaving
the frozen stock to slowly melt on the floor until the frozen guy got
in, the same was true for my dairy stock, but it wasn't as sensitive
to warming up a bit before being placed in the chilled cases. As we
started later, we'd leave at one in the afternoon when our section
mate got in to cover the back half of the day. I have to admit I
lucked-out and got the better part of the deal as I didn't have to
keep my hands in the frozen cases one hundred percent of the time.
Gone too, was being a 'full-time' employee. Once working thirty
hours or more was defined by employment laws to be 'full-time' and
anything less as 'part-time'. The laws had changed leaving it up to
each company to figure it out, with the proviso remaining that
forty hours had to be called full-time and anything
over was still legally deemed overtime for hourly workers. Full-time
employees got profit sharing at the end of the year, part-time
employees didn't, otherwise the benefits were the same and we
retained our insurance coverages. Only our department head was
chosen to be 'full-time' and the other three of us were deemed to be
part-time. I don't know how the frozen food pair worked out their
hours but for the first few months the dairy department head assigned
both himself and me forty hours a week even though I was 'part-time'.
After two months of this I jokingly asked the department head if
this meant I was actually a 'full-time' employee. He decided to ask
upper management about it, hoping to get me qualified for profit
sharing. Instead, for all following weeks my schedule was changed to
be thirty-nine hours and forty-five minutes so there would no longer
be any question about it.
Once Bud had 'straightened-out' the store into 'good working order'
like this, he entered a normal routine of coming to the store at nine
in the morning and roam the aisles to make sure all was to his
liking, and finding people to write up for things he didn't like.
Then he'd retire to the office where he would spend his time
scrutinizing the time cards and crunching the numbers. Soon after he
had come to run the store Bud had taken up to calling me ''Sport''.
I hadn't had a nickname since my high school days so I didn't mind
until I found out a few months later that Bud had named his dog at
home ''Sport'' and deemed me to be his store's version. Why?
Because of the stuttering or my mixed raced background? Or was I
simply chosen at random to be dubbed that? Who knows,
I didn't worry about it and just did my job.
Apparently I did my job well enough and I was never written up nor
did Bud ever have any complaints he felt I needed to know about and
by the end of this year he would be gone to whip a new business into
shape for his ''investor'' boss.
Goodbye.
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