Rainbow Foods
After my dads store closed…I think I still had the paper route…Im not totally sure. After I graduated from high school, I moved down to Eagan, MN to go to Brown Institute to get a degree in radio and TV broadcasting.
Shortly after I moved down there, I got a job at Rainbow foods, the only place I applied to, as a grocery stocker. I started on the cash registers and pretty much stayed there throughout my employment. As a cashier, I had to memorize most of the codes used in the produce and bakery departments and rang customers through as quickly as I could.
While I worked there, they put me in at 39.5 hours a week, which meant I wasn’t full time so they couldn’t give me any benefits.
During my time there, I worked in other positions as well when it wasn’t busy…such as cart return, grocery stocking, and dairy / frozen foods.
Working there was…hmm, not sure how I can say it. I liked working there, and liked being a cashier and all, but I just didn’t want to be a cashier. I couldn’t figure out why they didn’t want to put me into any other position, that is, until I talked to another employee. He said they hardly ever called him up unless there was no other choice. He hated it so much that he would purposely make mistakes and work slowly so that he wouldn’t be called up. I then realized that I was always up there because I was cranking the customers out. Id grab an item, toss it from my right hand to my left and grab another item….the first would hit the scanner lasers and immediately the second and third items hit it as well. Id take a soup can or baby food jar…slide it spinning across the scanner and ding ding ding ding ding, like a machine gun, I was one of the faster cashiers there and that is why I was up there so much. If it got busy, they would immediately call me up there right away.
Im not trying to brag or anything because Im not the worlds fastest cashier and I certainly didn’t aim to be, but I wanted to get back to stocking groceries or doing something other than standing there. I didn’t mind cashiering itself…I just didn’t want to stand there all day long for 7.5 hours as my back started killing me.
When I wasn’t cashiering, Id be outside pushing carts in, or Id be helping in the back room and using large pump jacks or motorized jacks and forklifts to move stuff around in the store. I had a blast doing that stuff.
I had fun stocking groceries and helping customers out and I learned a lot about how to deal with people.
Was it easy? I don’t know…depends on what you think is easy. It wasn’t terribly hard and It wasn’t terribly easy either. I had to know almost exactly where a product was in the store so I could stock it faster and help customers find it and that was a challenge when stuff is not where common sense tells you it should be. As a cashier, I had memorized many plu codes for the various departments so I could just place the product on the scale and zip it down the line. I had to work it quickly so I could enter any discounts and coupons they had. I know that isn’t really a higher level skill, but in a store, you want to be in and out quick and not have a cashier take 13 minutes ringing up an order. It could be a physically demanding job as you might be lifting bags of salt for an hour or so, or you could be pushing a row of metal carts through an inch of snow.
What I learned: I continued with my belief of always being busy and having stuff to do. My employer knew me well enough that they could depend on me to come in on a day off and work to help out. I also learned that if one does that from time to time, there are benefits in return. I learned really well how to work with the public and try to calm any customers down and help them the best I can.
I found out that some people can become very…emotional when they don’t get their way. I had a customer that came in with a coupon for Coke that I had never seen before and it didn’t look real. I called a service manager over and they agreed. Well the customer up and had a fit because of this and they threatened never to come to our store again. Hey, guess what? If you use that stupid line, do you really think we the employees, the store & company itself, and fellow customers want to see you there again? We want to keep customers, don’t get me wrong…but we don’t really want customers who throw a spazz fut when they don’t get their way. I had another customer in the express lane use every curse word in the book because I let the previous person through the line with 13 items instead of ten. Holy jeeze! People don’t seem to realize that its actually tons faster just to ring the customer through instead of counting the items, telling them to go to another line and have them pick up their items. Crimeny.
Some customers would try and sneak in expired coupons. Now…I know people use coupons and stuff and I have no problem with one or two expired coupons because that’s an honest mistake. But I had a couple of customers that were notorious for using expired coupons. Now, this may seem like no big deal…but all of the coupons I got, I had to turn in because that was figured into my totals for the day. If I accepted an expired coupon, the store couldn’t hand it in because they wouldn’t be reimbursed and might actually get fined from the company that reimburses them.
Would I do it again, I would…actually I just got hired at Wal Mart so it will be interesting to see what its like again working with people on a more one-on-one basis than I do now.