Tales from a part-time grocery clerk

[Cuddley_Battleship]

I'm bored, so I thought I'd share some stories from my career in retail. Some funny, some downright sad. I'm one of the Dairy/Frozen guys, (right in the middle/rear of the store, so I see everyone that comes through. Retards, foreign people, welfare moochers, you name it.). With that many people coming through, everything happens. People steal, shit themselves, puke, die, have seizures, feint, fall, break things, anything to ruin your day.

THEFT
Yes, people steal foodstuffs just as often as other things. A few incidents that stand out are:

Busy night, 10:30pm (an hour and a half after I'm supposed to leave) the shift manager comes up to me and asks me to keep an eye on two females that are apparantly shoplifting while he calls the checkouts and tells them whats going on.
"Sure. What do they look like?"
"Uh...they're native american."
So, I walked down the ends of the aisles and barely peeked down each one, when I saw them they both lurched back and looked at me, from 50 ft away when I didn't even look directly at them. They were stuffing things into a paper bag, to make it look like they already paid for it and forgot to get something. Anyway, the shift manager came back and I told him about their reaction. We couldn't do anything until they actually were out the door (and we absolutely did not have the time to take 2 hours to call the cops and file a report at 10:30) so he walked up to them and said "What you're doing looks very suspicious, know that we're watching you." One of them ran out of the place like a bat out of hell, the other walked out with an embarrassed look on her face. They left their cart, paper bag of stuff AND the one that took off left her purse in the cart. No ID, but plenty of makeup and a credit card.

Another time a mexican family decided to have their kids aged 4-12 (there were ~7 of them) load up a bunch of crap and try to sneak it out the door. It was several carts ($800+ worth) of stuff, and they failed. The parents wouldn't claim the kids so they ended up going to juvenile detention. Sad.

My favorite is a when a couple of people tried to steal a cart full of razor blades and got caught.

VOMIT
Best one is the time someone puked on the floor in front of my yogurt case when I was away. Someone paged me and said a customer told him they hurled in my department. When I got there, it looked like an unusual amount on saliva with corn and carrot pieces mixed in. I put down a Caution! Wet floor!/Achtung! Rutschiger boden!/ Cuidado! Piso mojado! cone and trekked the 600ft to the janitors room to get a mop/bucket. Yes, half our departments stock is liquid we don't have our own sink in the back. When I got back, some idiot had moved the cone or accidentally pushed it 30ft with their cart, and a 7 year old foreign kid was walking right into it. He slipped in it and went from being totally upright to spread flat on the floor in about .02 sec, and got it all over his leg.

Another time a retarded person puked on the floor in the department next to mine so I stayed there while someone else went to get a mop. We usually try to keep someone there if possible because people are so ****ing stupid they'll just plow right through it and make a bigger mess or kill themselves. In this case, I failed. A guy came right toward it, and I said "Hey, you gotta go around the other way, and I motioned toward the puke, which resembled liquified cheese. The idiot just kept going and went through it. ****ing idiot.

OOPS
People, being people, break things, a lot. And they leave things like glass bottles of liquid in my freezer that later explode if I'm not around to see them. I end up throwing away about $500 worth of our stuff a week from assholes leaving it where it doesn't belong.

Once, someone dropped a glass bottle of steak sauce in the frozen dept. As I was scooping up the glass, a girl turned a corner and stepped right in the middle of it. Best part, she was wearing sandals. My least favorite item is a gallon sized jar of spaghetti sauce. They make a distinctive *bap* when hitting the floor. And people somehow drop them far from their shelf spot in my department a lot.

One night I was making a list of things I needed, facing a case, and a kid walked behind me and was trying to balance a 1 gallon plastic jug of orange juice on his head. "I wish he wouldn't do that." I thought. Just as I 'thought' that I heard a *sploosh* and felt a few drops of cold liquid hit the back of my neck. It covered a 10ft by 10ft area, and the prick didn't even apologize for it. I wanted to unsheath my boxcutter and go at him like a hijacker on Sept 11. It took several minutes to soak up.

I saw a woman open a plastic tub of strawberry spead, stick her finger in it and lick it to see what it tasted like. I couldn't do anything but throw it away afterwards for fear of getting written up.

Another day someone knocked a plastic box of cookies off a table and onto the floor. The cookies scattered all over a dirty floor, and they just picked them up, shut the box and put it back. Again, all I could do was throw it away. Grr.

SHIT
My friends in the dry goods department have had to harvest logs from the floors of the aisles before. God knows how they got there, they must have been wearing a skirt and no underwear? One day that was hot and humid as hell I saw a guy wearing a pair of shorts chugging toward the restroom. He didn't make it, diarrhea ran down his legs and he ran out the door.

Praise the gods I don't have to clean the restrooms. Those poor guys find shit sprayed on the wall, once someone left shitty underwear hanging on the rim of a garbage can in there. Slobs.

Random crap

The other day I saw an older muslim women wearing a veil, etc shopping with her daughter (that was hot) who was wearing a slightly too small top and hip hugging jeans.

Someone bitched at me today about prices being higher as if it were my fault (it's mainly due to higher energy/fuel costs that get passed along). I guess it's my fault that there are fuel shortages, inflation, tax. Who'd have guessed? Or I could work for free and lower the cost that way.

If this was remotely entertaining or interesting I can come up with more, I just scratched the surface.

[SepH]

heh, I thought it was pretty funny. But the people that came to your store are complete ****ing retards! Who the hell "accidentaly" walks in a puddle of vomit? I never see those kind of things down here, perhaps I need to visit the mall more often.

[djbass]

Yes I can relate to many of those experiences during my short time as nightfill/spotting at the local grocery store.

Unfortunately due to my clumsyness there were a few of my own mishaps. Perhaps the worst was loading a trolley up with all the drinks to go out for the night, most of it in glass bottles. The trolley was pretty loaded down and made it hard to push and moreso to steer. As we were constantly under the whip of the duty manager to get things done as quick as possible I went screaming off towards the approriate isle with the goods and made a rather sharp turn once I got there. The end result is the trolley tipped on two wheels and spilled the entire load on the floor. Since as stated earlier these were all glass bottles filled with fizzy drink I could only watch as the foaming mass took over the isle like some creep from a b-grade horror flick. The manager to my surprise was placid about it and simply told me I had better get the mop & bucket and attend to it promptly.

Then there was the occasional antics one has to put up with from arsehole co-workers. I recall one guy in particular who persistantly would knock items off my trolley as we went passed each other. Instincively I hit my breaking point and tried to knock a carton off the top of his, unfortunately it went sailing into the side of a passing customer who gave me a stern lecture on being childish

[sword]

Sounds like a cool place to work.

[IncubusGod]

I've worked in the same position for a large part of college. This brought back a lot of memories...hence you will be hearing from my psychologist and laywers.


One of the more funny thing's I'd seen was when a quite irritating man had shouted at me becuase we didn't have the exact type of rasberry jam (without the seeds) that he liked. He threw an utter tantrum about it, then proceeded to push his trolly directly into a large display of bolognese jars, while still glaring over his shoulder at me.
The entire thing c-r-a-s-h-e-d to the floor, almost in slow motion, with each jar making that *baP* thud in a creshendo of pure, unrivaled embarassment for the man.
What's more is he didn't even bother to apologise. Just left his shopping trolly there and ****ed off.



The funniest thing I'd seen was when I was working in the frozen food section and this woman came up (youngish, mid 20's) with her boyfriend in tow. She had a flyer with a bunch of these 'special offer' deals listed, folder over to show 3 for 2 packs of fishfingers.
So she demanded to know why there weren't any of them on display when we had them in the flyer.
I went and looked, in the -25 freezer, froze my nads off looking, but we didn't have that brand or type.

So she threw a wobbly. Shouted at me. Stamped her foot. Pointed out that it wasn't only those, there were chicken fillets advertised that weren't there either.
So I said I would go have a look. She thrust the flyer at me, demanded to speak to my manager and said "there would be hell to pay".

I got my manager, went to leave to look for these chicken fillets and opened up the flyer.

It was for Super Value. A chain of supermarkets. Which is fine.

Cept this was SuperQuinn. A completely different, seperate chain of supermarkets.

I stopped, turned on my heels and with a wry smile walked back over. The woman stopped shouting at my manager and looked at me. I politely pointed out that this flyer was for another chain of retailers.

She didn't utter a word. Just calmly placed her basket on the floor and walked out the door. Leaving her bemused boyfriend looking at us.
He then just calmly walked out, not uttering a word.

Always check the chamber before you fire off a shot.

[Marilyn Manson]

Originally Posted by horn

i also got asked if we had "stop, or my mum will shoot", today. I thought of MM. Then i went home.

Who asked for it?!

[Hammerman]

I work in one of Sainsbury's off licenses, and when asking the customer, as we must, "Do you have a Nectar card?" his reply was.. "no.. do you get many actors around here?"

I then put a curse on him and his liver.

[Dace]

At work last Thursday i received a phone call from an irrate applicant..

I'd initially rejected the first form he'd sent in because the person who countersigned it lived with him (it was his carer).

It says clearly in the notes that the person who does countersign your passport application can't live at the same address.

He'd gone and gotten a new countersig (his doctor) but had failed to sign the declaration which is another auto-rejection.

I'd sent him out another letter and another form and asked him to fill it out correctly.


So anyways this guy phoned in during the morning (when i dont work) and a message had been left on the case notes of the application (on the system).

"Appt apologises in advance for his angry manner but he is disabled and in alot of pain"

Reading between the lines the case notes said the guy was a dick.



So anyways the guy phoned back when i was working.

Guy started off complaining about how he'd received conflicting information.

He hadn't.

The guy then went on to say that he was a veteran of HM forces and that he was in a wheelchair.

The guy had 7 slipped discs.

"SEVEN!" and had i ever had a slipped disc (i said no) or known anyone who had (again i said no even tho i had as this is how you kill a conversation in the shortest possible time).

Then the guy went on to explain how Charlie Clark (as in the Home Secretary) had phoned him that day and they had talked about his passport application and how people had messed things up and "how [Charles Clark] remembered the last time a Civil Service department had messed up one of [the disabled guy's] applications all the fuss that had been kicked up"

I listened to this guy's bullshit and then told him where he'd made his mistakes and when the guy STILL wanted to go on about it i lost my usually calm demeaner, raised my voice a touch and told him to "JUST GET THE SECTIONS OF THE APPLICATION FORM FILLED IN LIKE IVE TOLD YOU TO. OK?!" and when he said "ok" i said "Right. Goodnight" and just hung up on him (which we're not supposed to do but "HEY I WAS FEELING REBELLIOUS!").



****ing cripple trying to get a conversation out of someone (me) who has better things to do with his time than talk to retards with no ****ing friends.

[Yahwe]

the preffered tactic of terrorist to forge passports is to go to british consulates in foreign territories and say "i acceidentally put my passport through the washing machine please give me some temporary papers"

i see no reason why britain shouldn't fall back on it's old class system.

anyone upper class would say "look here my good man"
anyone middle class would say "please help me I need it"
anyone lower class would be in england.

(of course i am teasing. but there is a serious point to be made that several (documented) terrorists have obtained not passports, but the equivalent temporary embassy documents. because they made a fuss and cried racism. i only ask. If we can have an upper class that never forces coup de ta's (or however they are spelt) and a middle class that tries always to undermine the upper class. and a working class (that quite frankly i would rather go drinking with). then wouldn't it be easier to stop someone who lied about 'putting their passport through the wash' because you could question how he afforded the plane fare

just a suggestion.

[Cuddley_Battleship]

I forgot to include our screw ups too. Here are some.

Part II

The company I work for has a 'kid magnet' program that includes having carts that have a plastic car attached to the front for kids to sit in. My co-worker and I were hauling out a pallet of frozen meals (the thing was 7 ft high and weighed as much as a small car). We went around a corner about 3 times as fast as we should have, and a stack of cases tipped and fell off. The case on the top hit the 'hood' of the kiddie cart as hard as if I would have thrown it and scared the shit out of the 2 little kids sitting in it.

We've ****ed up a lot of things with forklifts. Once we dumped a ton of plastic milk crates all over the back room. We stack them onto pallets, wrap them in plastic wrap and send them back. One weekend, we ran out of plastic wrap and had enough crates to fill a large house (no kidding). The roof is high enough to stack 3 pallets worth on top of each other with a forklift, about 20 ft high. We had no room to spare, so we had to stack them even though they weren't wrapped (they're really unstable). The shift manager was about to fork 2 pallets onto a third that was up against a wall. "If it starts to tip, get the hell out of the way." It tipped (shitty pallet wasn't level) and sent 6 x 12 x 3 = 216 milk crates all over the place. Another time someone sheared off a sprinkler head INSIDE THE FREEZER with it. Imagine the mess.

Once I ruined over $1000 worth of bags of shredded cheese because the roll-around case I put them in was a POS and randomly switched from cooler to freezer.

During the summer, our night guy was training in his replacement while he was gone. The night guy has to unload and stock all the frozen stuff for the next day (when its busy it can be more than half a semi trailer worth of shit, and you have 6 hours). It was the new guy's first night of training. He worked for a bit, went on his break and never came back or answered his phone, LOL.