After I left my first after-school “real” job at Kingsway because they expected us to come in on Sundays to clean the store, I got a job at the Mega Foods in Glen Ridge, where I was again grocery clerk , shelf stocker and sometime cashier.
I eventually gravitated to a job I’ll call “cellar man”, for lack of a better name. I listed grocery items that needed restocking, pulled the corresponding boxes out of the stacks, price-stamped them, and put the box on the conveyor belt leading back upstairs. Simple-minded, predictable and repeatable. Working without any immediate supervision, uninterrupted and alone with my thoughts, that cellar job turned out to be good practice for my later career of programming computers.
Not that I was totally alone down there. The conveyor belt rose from a spot only a few feet from the ladies’ room, so I often got the chance to see and kid around with the cashiers. In particular I remember flirting with Myrtle
Hmm, did anybody else in the history of the world ever type in those exact three semi-rhyming words? Let’s ask Google… …dang, I am disappointed, someone has, “About 1,960 results (0.75 seconds)”. Tom, best friend of “The Great Gatsby”, has been “flirting with Myrtle”, the wife of the owner of the garage halfway between Gatsby’s place and New York City. It’s also something Harry Potter does in chapter 19 of the fanfiction “Harry Potter and the Daywalker”. It all goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun.
But I digress – back to the real Myrtle. She was 29, shy, petite and sexy in her coarse cotton wraparound company smock. She really knew how to hold a man’s attention. On the downside, she was married and about 10 years older than I, so nothing ever came of our talks except the pleasure of flirting.
There were other temptations associated with being cellar man. Who has not wanted to sample those fancy jarred pickles and olives on display? In the privacy of my cellar, I did just that, popping one or two vacuum seals every day, maybe unscrewing a maraschino-cherry lid as well. As far as I know, no customer ever complained. Kids, if you buy a jar of something and the lid doesn’t pop when you open it, take it back. It probably won’t kill you, but why find out?
Relatedly, on my earlier, Kingsway job, Tuesdays were a special day for us part-time clerks. It was the store manager’s day off, and assistant manager Freddy went to class in the afternoon. On a typical Tuesday afternoon, we’d destroy one or two sheet cakes and several large bottles of soda. It was like being invited to a birthday party every week.
There were no scan codes then, so every item had to be hand-stamped with the price. Like any job, no matter how menial, stamping prices on groceries can be interesting and fun if you make it a challenge. For example, a case of single rolls of toilet paper contains 100 rolls, in five tiers of 20 rolls, 5 by 4. Sounds like it would take a long time to stamp, right? Ha, not the way I did it!
Upstairs is the bottle-return station, where a cashier counts customers’ empty, usually dirty, glass bottles and refunds their deposit money, two cents for small bottles and five cents for large. (A Seinfeld episode touches on these values.) There’s a sort of vertical conveyor belt with buckets big enough to hold two or three bottles lying down. The cashier holds down a button and the buckets head for the cellar, where they invert and their contents clank into a sawdust-padded carousel. Not every bottle survives the trip in one piece.
Emptying the carousel involves picking through the sawdust and sorting the bottles into crates by brand and size. Nobody in their right mind wants to do that, not even wearing gloves, so management assigns each part-timer a turn at it. Part-timers are expendable and band-aids are available. Only rarely does anyone need to go get stitches.
Our sister store in East Orange had a fire, with much water damage. After the insurance adjusters left, one of the Mega Foods executives apparently decided that the damaged stock in the cellar was still saleable and could go back on the shelves, likely double-dipping the insurance settlement. The remains were trucked over to Glen Ridge and heaped up in my cellar. Although there are companies that do fire remediation for a living, yours truly was assigned the task of cleaning up those soggy piles and getting the goods back on the shelves.
The boxes were soaked and falling apart, the goods inside were wet, and everything stank of smoke. For two days, I made an honest job of cleaning up some of it, but it was hopeless. There was just too much; it was enormous and depressing. I called in sick for a few days, then quit. Hmm, I wonder if Mom could get me an introduction to one of the trade unions like she did for my brother?