This Is Your Life on Retail: March 2022

Hello world.

 

It's been a long time since I've blogged. I've been busy dealing with the vicissitudes of life. Here I'd like to continue my dialogues about what retail work has been like at this current juncture, amidst the pandemic still going on, corrupt corporate policy and abuse, and the war in Ukraine. 

First off, a general rundown on the gig. The daily grind as a cashier at a multimillion dollar company has become much more difficult. There's not much staff to help you with, well, anything. Management is always absent from the front end so most of the time you're on your own. 

There's no baggers to help you bag the large orders that come down your line nonstop for eight hours straight. 

The union has finished up its voting for the strike authorization vote but it remains to be seen if there really will be a strike. I was skeptical about the vote to strike authorization because it seems that most of the public has given up on retail workers at this point. We need your support still and our fight isn't over even at this stage of the pandemic.  

At the beginning retail workers were heroes. The customers supported us as much as nurses even because of the pandemic. But now, the customers show us a lot more of the contempt hidden in their hearts for the unskilled labor. It's very easy to hate unskilled labor. Nowadays, there's always a yelling going back and forth throughout the day between cashiers and customers. Something about a dollar off most of the time that could be easily resolved but management will only agree to things if they just want people to go away so they don't have to deal with it. 

The union asked the company for $5, $1 extra per year for five years. Even that alone won't be enough for the workers to live on in California. The company said no, so they've been reduced to going down to $3, $1 per year for three years. That's an even worse proposal. But if they could get it, it would still be a victory for the workers and a victory is a victory, no matter how small.  

I'm not surprised by any of this. In fact, most of the stuff I mentioned here has already been mentioned in a lot of my other blogs about retail during the pandemic. 

And yet covid is still happening there and now the customers don't have to wear facemasks. Today at work, I had to work at the only cashier station that didn't have a plastic shield shielding me from customers and their maskless faces. Thanks a lot you corporate guys.

As Loki says in the show, "trust my rage." 

For those who are interested, compare this post about working conditions today with about a year ago, you can read it here.

Thank you for the support. 

The song we sing, did you know, we're listening. 

Thanksgiving Covid 2.0

Whew! Wow! We made it past Thanksgiving! 

Retail work at the grocery job during Thanksgiving Covid 2.0 was intense. Out of all my years at the company since 2013, this was the hardest Thanksgiving that I've ever worked since I started working retail back in 2009 back home. What made it so different from every other year? Not enough staff, not enough baggers, management constantly mismanaging employee breaks, no social distancing, no limit or cap on number of customers or any of the items they buy. In short, it was a circus show. But that's okay, that's life, that's work. But is it though? Is it something we, as workers have to become accustomed to? 

Covid has unquestionably made an eternal impact upon the world of retail grocery. It cannot go back to the way it was before-albeit still poorly mismanaged by upper and lower management, but Covid has unveiled something much more menacing-the dark heart of human nature in the workplace. I can always take time to look at what's truly there but hidden, the dark side of human nature.  

As bad as Covid in the workplace has been for us at my store, what has arguably become much worse is the attitude and mentality of customers, and lower and upper management. I've increasingly seen over these some ten years that they are the ones hurting the employees the most. 

Now that Covid has been raging for two years, the customers at my store have become more unruly than ever. This might be the height of American retail ignorance, the worst I've ever seen. They aren't willing to listen or take other considerations, instead their go to is to become aggressive and/or start yelling like a child when they don't get what they want. 

On the opposite spectrum lower and upper management have become so cold to employees to the point where it's become obvious that they don't give a shit about what's going on, what's really going on behind the scenes. They aren't ignorant, rather they're negligent, unforgiving, and just generally don't care. 

I work for the Local Union 770 and I can tell you this much, our union doesn't do much to help the morale of the average UFCW worker. These employees are left to fend for themselves, fighting for scraps of whatever little hours they can get per week. The sad irony is that in the past these jobs used to count for something because they were reliable and were supported by a much stronger more influential union. What we have today is a shell of that stable job and strong influential union. However, I must admit that I'm pro labor union and pro employees despite what may be written here. 

Going back to this Thanksgiving week. This has been one of the most brutal holiday work experiences in my lifetime. During the first year of Covid it wasn't this bad. Which goes to our original question, how did things deteriorate to this level? The easy quick answer is antipathy, utter lack of care from management, which begs the question, will work become a lesser entity within our lives as Covid progresses through its many stages and mutations? Will work not even matter at some point? Will money become a much more valuable commodity because less people will be working and/or quit working these types of jobs? In the end if everybody stops caring about work, will the quality of work and jobs in the different fields naturally deteriorate to a low base level? 

The value of work and labor is up for grabs. When you see the working conditions at my store you will very easily be able to understand why most of the staff have quit, why they can't get people to stay at the store and continue to work for very long, in essence why they can't pay someone enough to even care about anything that goes on there. They can't pay them enough to even care. 

Which makes it very easy to see why record numbers of Americans quit their jobs in October. In addition, even office workers are getting fed up because under Covid conditions they're expected to be on the clock 24/7, even installing apps on their phones so that their upper management can keep tabs on them and force them to keep undergoing training modules. 

Is this the future of labor in America? If so, America has ultimately failed its citizens and my entire generation. It's no wonder that Americans have become fools, getting wasted on alcohol, drugs, wild parties, hazing, fast cars and fast women, growing fat off the bourgeois comforts of America, not caring about their jobs or quality of work, only to realize that the abyss is staring at them in the morning as they head off to work or clock in at home. 

New Year's Motivational Speel

Life has been pretty grand. Christmas is over and 2019 is two days away. Its that time of year for that classic social media status: New Year, New Me. Yeah, yeah, we get it, you're gonna push yourself hard, work out, and get everything you ever wanted done, or at least try your best. Its good to be motivated, but its also good to be practical about things. Time is the killing blow for most people. If you don't have enough time you won't get things done. 

I've been trying to stay motivated with my usual activities; reading, writing, and playing guitar. In fact if I had a New Year's resolution its this: to play more guitar, learn more songs, and record more on my own as well as with friends. I also plan on learning more about computers in my free time. I don't think I'll become a computer programmer (even being a bad one is hard), but I'd like to learn as much as I can about programming just for my own personal knowledge and such. I've just finished this 500 page computer book on how hardware and software work, and before that I read Hackers by Steven Levy, and that's kind of what caught my interest. Also, about a year and a half ago I signed up for Codeacademy, a free online programming tutorial app. I think I'll actually give that a second go this year. Its complex stuff but its also interesting enough to look into. 

I also want to work more on recording, my own recordings in particular. Add more music on my YouTube page. Reading is a must as well. And I want to write more short stories and start an actual novel, a short one, maybe like 150 pages, something like that. I have some ideas for it already, it would be a near distant future sci-fi story about everyday type of people and workers, more literary than spaceships and laser guns. Maybe more like speculative fiction than true science fiction.

However, its hard to stay motivated. Sometimes after an eight hour retail shift I don't feel like playing guitar, I just want to listen to music or play games. The reality is that if I don't practice guitar at night after work I probably wouldn't have played guitar at all that day. I've realized that in order to get the results I want in life I have to push myself, I have to be disciplined because nobody will be disciplined for me. My music mentor, Frank Abbinanti, a new music composer, lives in Chicago so when he says to learn Sequenza by Berio, I have to have the motivation on my own to actually work on it, otherwise I'll never learn it. Likewise, if I don't learn how to record better songs, and actually do it, I'll never have new songs to post on my YouTube channel. 

Its not going to be easy and I suspect some nights I won't play guitar, write, study, or read. But I won't let that stop me from achieving my goals. 2018 was a good year for me but in 2019 I want to get more done. Read more novels, write more short stories, begin a novel, record more music, play and record more guitar, and of course have fun with my friends and family. 

Keep working hard at the things that matter to you and you'll really get what you want out of life, that's what I've learned. 

Life is good! 

Divison of Labor

Hey, more feel good psychological and vlog-esque writing for you all. Here I'd like to go into how I started living a more positive life, and positive outlook, specifically using a 'division of labor'. How I divide my time during the day has impacted me in more ways that I would've otherwise expected. I don't follow a schedule or anything but in a sense all of my time is spent on specific things. 

Typical day before work by myself
I would wake up late but early enough to have about 4 or 5 hours before my work shift. I usually start by playing a few rounds of Overwatch, but I've also been known to play Chess lately. 

Then after that I read the news typically. It could be a short reading session or it could last over an hour, it really depends on my mood. Then I like to walk to the library and read out of a physical book for a while, just right before my work shift. Being at the library is better than being at home because at home the computer is a distraction from reading a physical book. That would be a great typical day by myself. 

Typical day before work with friends 
With my friends we always like to get something to eat. It could be cheap junkfood like TacoBell, I'm partial to the Taco Supreme 3 taco meal lately. Then we play video games, mostly Marvel vs Capcom 2 right now, an old 2D fighting game from the 90s, Sega Dreamcast days. Then we jam on instruments. We have ukulele, bass, and acoustic guitar. The other guys aren't quite there musically but I still enjoy teaching them things, they can improve. 

Typical day off
This isn't too much different from anything else really. I usually start on the computer gaming until I get tired of it, then read the news, and perhaps I'll hang out with friends before they go to work, or after they finish a shift. Sometimes I go to the bar with friends. I try to go to the open mic music nights at the local bar.

Typical night hours after 1 am shifts 
My time after a 1 am retail shift is very valuable to me. This is where I get a lot of reading done, again news, and whatever I want to read on my Kindle, which right now has been Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, hence the 'Division of Labor' blog post title. In a sense doing all of these things every day is a job, although I'm having fun. 

Not only do I write blog posts (and should be writing more short stories soon) at night but its also my prime slot for guitar, only acoustic guitar this late. Right now I'm learning how to play Berio's Sequenza for guitar. Because I have limited time to practice its important for me to play everyday, even if its only 25-45 minutes a day. 

But why?    
A division of time into the things I do and a sort of outline of my plans is good for me. Its like an improvised schedule, it can change at any time but at the same time its sort of like my bread and butter. Doing this division of labor has given me a more positive outlook because I have broken down all my goals and have been actively going for it. The goals are very simple-relax, read, music, work, repeat.  Losing weight is also big on my list.

Imagine a guitar player who only practiced once a week. And then picture a guitarist who plays everyday 15 minutes. The once a week guy plays 4 hours once a week. The guy who plays everyday 15 minutes would still be the better guitar player overall even after six months of playing. I've put that kind of approach to my everyday life. Do the things you love and relax, everyday.