“I used to work at a small, family-owned grocery store for a few years. We got our load in on Mondays and Thursdays, but we got passed over one Monday and the distributor said we would get the missing load in on Thursday. So, what essentially happened was a double load and my two receiving partners were out sick. I was the only person in the warehouse/receiving at the time and got to take on fifteen pallets of groceries that needed to hit the shelves immediately.
I was specifically told to not go up front and to do what I could while the front-end crew covered the aisles and cash registers. Well, a lot of them were either lazy, untrained, or just putting in their hours so they could pay bills. I put in my earbud, just one, and got to work. I was halfway through checking in the pallets when I got called up front. So I ignored it and continued. Then I got called again. So I headed up there and got yelled at by a new hire with a bad attitude to ‘do your job and bag for me!’ The customer was a regular and we got along very well, and she told me she was fine and could bag her own groceries.
Between the customer and the fact I wasn’t having it, I walked away. I had three years and two ranks on her, so I didn’t let it phase me and went back to my pallets. Then I got the newest hotshot manager, who replaced the old hotshot manager, who replaced the beloved manager who trained basically the whole store, in my face about having an earbud in on the clock, and said I could be sent home and not come back if I wanted to listen to music. I gestured to the pallets and said, ‘Go for it, these all need to be checked in and broken down. Have fun.’
I got to keep my earbud in. So I had that going for me, which was nice.”
