Clean Up In Aisle Me

Of all the tedious ordeals I’ve endured in my life, few were as deeply scarring and dismal as the five years I spent as an associate at a Grand Union grocery store. Three nights a week throughout high school and beyond, I donned a stain encrusted red vest and entered a brutal world in which the cranky whims of the elderly were law.

The Grand Union corporation is now defunct, so if you’ve never had the pleasure please allow me to enlighten. Picture the most dank, filthy, mite-infested refugee camp you can (oh, just pick one – we haven’t got all day!). Now fill it with rotting food and scores of angry octogenarians who would gladly see you tortured or slain if it meant saving six cents on frozen peas. Garnish with Carly Simon music played through a World War II era PA system, and you’re getting close to Grand Union.

I was particularly blessed to live in a small town where computers, or “magic boxes” as they were known, had not yet propagated. Thus, all the registers were of the 1920’s cash machine variety, wherein prices must be entered by hand, and the “6” button tends to stick. Speaking of the cash register, this seems as good an opportunity as any to discuss the Dantean levels of Hell which reside within the lime green walls of Grand Union.

It is a common notion that cashier is the lowest possible position in a supermarket. This is untrue. Many ambitious young upstarts make this mistake, preferring to work “the floor,” pricing cans of saur kraut and mopping up gallons of Miracle Whip. Not particularly glamorous, but the significant reduction in human interaction makes it infinitely more desirable than cashier work. This is the glittering promise that sucks young men, like myself, into a hideous trap.

You see, I learned in my tenure that the cash register is like the mafia in two ways: first, there is no way out once you are in, and second, if you spend enough time around it you will eventually want to murder someone. So, while “stockboy” is by definition the least unbearable of grocery store tasks, that status is fully dependent on one’s ability to stick to the job description. This is where things fall apart.

And this is why stocking shelves is actually a worse job than running register: because the slightly less miserable work of the stockboy will be constantly interrupted by eardrum bursting calls from the lady at the front desk, declaring in a voice thick with disgust, “Josh to the front, please. Josh to the front.” Your heart sinks. Your dreams shatter. You’ve been had! Now not only are you not a stockboy anymore, you’re not even a cashier. You’re anextra cashier!

The betrayal stings sharply, supposing that you still have human emotions at this point. Before too long you find yourself wishing to die, and not long after that you shed your humanity altogether and accept your demise. At this point you can actually feel your soul leave your body through your hands and stream into the cash register where it is converted into power and used to run the conveyor belt.

And that’s all during your first shift.

After three years the management, or the “overlords” as we were to call them, honored me with a transfer to the deli department. At least their manner and tone of voice indicated that they were honoring me. The experience that was to follow was as far removed from honor as anything I’ve known.

Again the theory is almost admirable: a trusted young employee is chosen to essentially run his own department, and Deli products are not paid for at the counter, so there is no money exchanged. Small, small consolations for the horrors that lie within.

The first problem manifested itself physically as a thick membrane of grease covering my entire body. The deadly combination of high school aged skin and a deep fryer seems to me like something we as a society would try to avoid, and yet most jobs available to the 16-21 agegroup are grease related.

Another pitfall of deli work is an almost blinding exposure to human weakness. Not ones’ own weakness, although I’m sure it plays a part. The ugliness here gushes from the pours of the customers. If aliens are observing us from above, and who doubts that they are, I pray that they have not been watching the Grand Union Deli. If they have, we are through.

The deli customers I encountered all seemed to have confused the definitions of the words “deli” and “coup d’etat,” since each behaved with a level of anxiety and swallowed rage that seems inapropriate for someone buying cheese. But I’m afraid it wasn’t completely their fault that there was trouble. The Grand Union corporation loved to play into their weaknesses.

Case in point, the “buy a half pound, get a half pound free” sale. This confusing mockery of a sale took a wildly overpriced deli product and offered shoppers an extra half pound if they would buy the first. Straightforward, eh? Well, any critical mind would immediately realize that buying a half pound of roast turkey at 300% what you normally pay for a half pound of the store brand means that you have spent 150% more than you would have, includingthe extra half pound. But without fail, shoppers clawed and shoved their way up to the counter and ordered the sale turkey, extra pounds of it sometimes.

Of course in the arrogant idealism of my youth, I took it upon myself to educate everyone, explaining that the store keeps the prices so high that they can pull a stunt like this and fool everyone. The lesson for me was that a grease-covered, crusty vest-wearing high schooler should never even insinuate that anyone else is less intelligent than he.

In hindsight, I suppose I could have washed the vest.