Retail Report January 2023

Good Evening, 

How is life treating you? In this crazy, topsy, turvy world one can sometimes not tell. Here I'd like to jot down some notes of what retail grocery has been like so far, this being the end of the first month of 2023. 

First, business is booming but inflation has hit our store shelves harder than ever. These are the most egregious prices for food that I have ever seen in my entire life. Many customers complain about the prices all day long and honestly, I can't blame them. We are, at this moment, selling a carton of eggs for $9.99. Meat prices are also very high. Most people stock up on the cheap stuff: grains, noodles, junk food like chips and soda, beer and wine. I don't think Americans are eating very well. And on top of that, a lot of them are beginning to become obese. Only in America. 

Second, this is sort of minor but it's little things like this that get ignored that eventually grow into bigger issues getting ignored. The store's front door that opens and closes electronically when customers walk through has been broken for the last ten days. Meaning it won't open/close electronically anymore, therefore, the store manager has decided to leave the front door open at all times. Now, this isn't too big of an issue if you're a customer going for a quick beer run but for us employees this has become a big issue in the middle of winter, where cold windy air blasts are hitting you while on the checkstand, some nights its been like 47 degrees. You can justify the fact that the door's been like that for ten days anyway you want, but I see it for what it is, cutting costs at the employees' expense. Brrrrrrrrr! 

Also, on top of that there's always the covid issue. Most management and both upper management have not been wearing facemasks since the beginning. This set a bad precedent for all the employees, so that when covid hit our store hard, many employees simply didn't even come back and we lost a lot of workers. At one point there was some 32 employees sick with covid. I was surprised but at the time the vaccine was out so I felt safer, especially with mask wearing. 

In addition, another bad precedent that the upper management set was that they decided very early to remove the plastic barriers guarding between the cashiers and the customers, both inside the checkout lanes and on the side self-checkout lanes. This is especially bad because covid isn't over and most customers don't wear facemasks, meaning they could easily spread particulates into the air by talking loudly. Although we have vaccines there are some employees and managers that don't have the vaccine, and have been infected with covid several times over, making the store still a potential place to catch covid.   

Third, business is booming and the lines are never ending, leading to tiring, long work days. Despite high inflation prices, the work is still intense and nonstop. I would say the work became much more intense since covid 2020, and has stayed that way ever since. As a cashier who mostly works self-checkout most shifts, I would say the work is at its most intense, since I've started back in 2013, shockingly. Although the work is easy and self-explanatory in most cases, overall, when you consider how many customers I'm going through and helping individually, it's a nonstop never-ending rollercoaster. 

In fact, I've had to take more time to rest and sleep longer during the day to deal with it. All my shifts are usually 330pm-12am shifts so working late all day and staying up half the night doesn't help. I'm getting older, but getting older doesn't hit you this fast. A part of it is the fact that the work I'm doing is intense, nonstop, and very fast. Most of the day you don't get time to think, reflect, or have time to think of things to say to people, including the people you're helping in the moment in real time. You learn to sort of grunt or say stock phrases and just press buttons, thus making the job more manageable. Life in big city.

Lastly, the good thing about my retail grocery gig is that I'm full time, I'm in the Union, and I've created a work persona that's somewhat popular over there. I mostly just get brownie points for being an agreeable guy and helping customers but I've become so good at it and so well known, that even my management and upper management commend me for it, whereas in the past, that wasn't always the case. Sometimes it takes a while to win over your bosses. But it is my capacity for happiness that is carrying me through what is an obviously grueling job day in and day out. 

Sometimes I think about doing other things: going back to college, getting a degree, doing something with it, going to trade school, doing something with a trade, or working harder on music and a band and touring, or just writing like I am now, only writing books and selling them. There's a myriad of things I could do, or not do, but none of that changes my degree of happiness or capacity for happiness. Surprisingly, I'm happy doing what I'm doing now. I sort of see that the work has become a one-note samba, but I won't let that discourage me from my path. The only path I see right now, is the path moving forward, into tomorrow. 

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Holiday Retail 2022

Good evening ladies and gentlemen, 

It's been a while since I wrote one of these. Here I'd like to explain to you what it's been like working the retail gig this holiday season. 

First, the work has been intense and nonstop. I've been working 42-48 hour weeks since November and the work isn't letting up even going into this week and Christmas week. The good news is that the pay is decent but it's tough making it through the slog every shift. I've been working five days per week with only two days off since the summer. 

Second, cold/flu and covid season is here again, and with that brings sicknesses, mostly of a respiratory nature. For the first time since covid began in 2020, I finally got a regular cold. It only lasted a day or two but it was setback from my usual day to day routine. I still went to work as I felt well enough, but I probably initially got sick from work, from customers and/or employees. 

Third, my job has become easier but its still grueling. I've sort of graduated from having to do regular checkout scanning large orders. Rather, my management has decided they want me to run self-checkout for my eight hour shifts, as its mostly machine button pressing menu, and the older cashier employees who aren't used to computers don't want to do it at all. So I sort of lucked out. Because the older employees don't want to do it, I end up doing it, and I get to avoid doing all the heavy lifting $400-$600 holiday orders and bagging a million bags. Not too shabby! 

Fourth, the type of employees that get hired and stay on the job has diminished immensely. Right now, they want anyone they can because they need cashiers. So they hire them and immediately promote them to cashier. The problem is that none of them stay. There are two other young people my age, two girls, who are very good cashiers but all of the other young people are baggers or other positions that work menial side jobs in other departments. A lot of them are special needs and the regular ones seem to have a lot of behavioral issues. I've had to learn how to talk to these kids in a certain type of way to get them on my side and help me out. Not ideal to getting the job done everyday! 

Fifth, management seems to be good this year at getting the job done. But they have done a horrible job in encouraging mask wearing so oftentimes the youth get sick easily and spread it around so that's concerning. My main problem with the management is that since day one in 2020 they weren't enforcing mask wearing either by customers or employees. That has been a problem since the early days of covid. The actual boss and co-director never wear masks and have had covid already several times. They probably spread it. One of the sales managers has had covid several times as well. I keep my mask on and keep my distance from all of them for my own safety. They all have failed horribly on this one simple task. 

Lastly, the job has become more machine-like. You really get a sense that you're a cog in the machine in there nowadays. The upper management lack empathy, but you also see it at the lower management level as well as from the customers, that that's expected from customers at this point in the game. You have to really dig deep to see empathy and compassion from others there nowadays, but it is still there in small doses here and there. It's not the worst place in the world, but you can sort of see that one day this entire operation, this job will eventually become obsolete if replaced by machines. The self-checkout tells me that everyday. 

All that being said, my personal life is quite magisterial. I learned how to play piano, sing better, and drums. I can speak Spanish pretty well now, as well as a little French, Italian, German, and even Portuguese. I'm still reading the western canon and loving every minute of it. C'est la vie. 

Happy Holidays!

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Lebensmitteleinzelhandel

Gute Abend, 

Here I thought I'd share a post about what it's been like working the retail grocery store, this far in the game, two years into covid, after working there for nine years. Buckle up, here we go. 

Okay, so let's start with the good. After busting my ass working hard for nine years, on the ninth year I finally got promoted to full-time status as a full-time cashier. I no longer have to push carts, take out trash, do carryouts, or open the gate for the truck driver. My pay went up slightly but it's really not all that and a bag of chips by any means. 

Now for the bad, get ready for chapter and verse. 

For starters, my management has become more aggressive and intense towards me. One of my managers has formed an active dislike for me and yells at me across the front end to shut up, and threatens me that she will talk to my store director unless I actually do shut up. So that's a new one. The other managers let me do my thing most of the time, one of them actually puts me in charge and he goes on about doing his own thing the entire night. 

Second, my overall eight hour work days have become much more intense. We lost a lot of employees. The ones that get hired quit once they see how hard the work is. Not many of the young bagger kids want to be promoted to cashier because they know dealing with the customers is tricky and difficult especially in combination with dealing with the sales managers, front end manager, co-director, and store director. Consequently, I end up doing a lot more work. 

Most of my shift now includes running seven self-checkout machines by myself for eight hours, usually from three-thirty pm to twelve am, five to six days per week. I get two ten minute breaks and one thirty minute break. The machines are glitchy but I've already figured out some ways to speed up the machines manually if things get too busy. When you're helping one person, another person needs help on another machine, then another, ad infinitum, per eight hours. 

So there's the machine I have to deal with, as well as the customers themselves, as well as the money and cash handling. I've done the work piece meal here and there over the years but I was only part-time and wasn't working many hours. In comparison, I used to work about 28-35 hours per week for many years, and now I'm working 42-48 hours a week, sometimes six days a week. I never thought I would become a shopkeeper. The joke is that I've become petite bourgeois. 

Third, more good. I get to meet many new and different people each day. My money addition and subtraction skills are instant. I can read people now. My customer service skills and dealing with the public has improved. My paychecks are larger. My job has stayed the same but the same old has surprisingly become better. I got a snare drum, cymbal, and two guitars from customers. And not only that, but the other day, a neighbor, who's a customer gave me a ride to guitar center.

There's always two sides to the coin. Retail is very intense and unforgiving, but me, being the person I am, surprisingly I've made it work all these years and I've been at the company since 2013. In 2023 it will be ten years and I'll get a small pension out of it. 

Lastly, there's one critical element that we're missing. Can you be happy doing something like this for employment? 

For me, yes you can. Because, using the free time I have between shifts, I've been able to become a better musician [I now can sing, play bass, piano, and drums], and I've even become an intellectual [I've read the western canon, philosophy, history, and learned languages]. 

But it's still a tough job. In fact, the first five years were brutal and I had to do a lot of life learning to get past those first five years. But now, I'm older, tougher, but yet fundamentally still the nice guy with the gift of gab. 

In terms of covid the stores are doing much better but I'm still wearing a mask for personal safety.

Happy holidays!

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Spring Break 2022!

Hello, good readers of the ofigueroamusicblog. It's been a pretty long time since I've updated, so here I am, ready to share more information on what it's like working at the job still under covid conditions and more. 

First, the working conditions have improved since I've last posted. There was going to be a possible strike but the company ended up giving in to most but not all of the demands from the union. We've also since added more staff to the front end. And inspiringly, I got promoted to cashier position after many years of toiling in the vineyards. 

However, this doesn't mean that the working conditions are optimal. We're still working under covid conditions, there are still a few covid cases every now and then, and most of the customers aren't wearing masks while they get extremely close to our bodies and faces. Covid has been extremely brutal for workers in the retail industry. In addition, now that the weather has become a lot hotter, the masks have become really hot again, but again, I can't take it off, unless I want to risk the wrath of possible covid exposures. 

I've mostly been chilling by myself and occasionally with a few friends. It's funny because, two years later, still under covid, I find myself only really going out to dinners with family and friends. It's my favorite social occasion. I've since left a lot of my many much more casual friends/acquaintances, to focus more on doing my own thing, which involves a lot of reading, guitar, and studying languages, mostly Spanish. 

I started the morning by reading Machiavelli's Mandrake, a comedy play about a young man who tricks an old scholar fool into letting him fuck his beautiful young wife. Talk about uncomfortable reading. In a way you could say c'est la vie but if it was your wife or your girlfriend what would you do? What if you never find out like our old scholar dude? It's certainly a funny story. Maybe the ends do justify the means, because in the end the wife wants to do it again with the young man, and even befriends him and gives him a room at her and her husband's estate. Talk about the ends justifying the means. 

I also found time to read Seneca's Agamemnon tragedy and start reading The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity, a deep thinker for ya, anthropology and sociology.

Lastly, I even found time to jam with my friend Jason who plays the alto saxophone. You can find our most recent live recording here.

Although work has been the norm throughout and around all this activity, I'll be able to rest easy knowing that I'll be getting the better contract raises, and although I'll get less hours as a result of getting paid more, in that process I'll actually get the same and/or more money for less hours of work. Not too shabby! I found 100 rupees! 

Although I haven't gone anywhere in a few years and things have stayed relatively the same I feel like I'm on a grand spring break adventure for the moment. 

If you're looking for a reading adventure look no further than the beginning of my covid plague journal where I write about the beginning of the pandemic and the working conditions at the gig. There are many posts in the plague journal now after these two covid years. Read all about it here.

Let there be peace and love in the universe as well as within your life. 

You Can Change Your Blizzard Battletag Now

You can now change your Blizzard Battletag now. For the paltry (or extravagant) sum of $10. Before you could change your Battletag only once and then it locked forever. At least now you can change it. Changing it only affects your name but things like your friends list remains the same.

Here we could have a discourse over how Blizzard is going crazy with all this cash crop bullshit. Like, why can't you just change it like every couple months if you want for free? That seems reasonable. But on the other side we have to consider that Blizzard is a business making money. Perhaps they've gone to the point of being more about the money than the games? Nah! That's poppycock! Blizzard is all about delivering a great online gaming experience to its playerbase for years to come. Some things cost money and unfortunately changing your name will cost you 10 bucks.

In the scheme of things this is pretty important news. For the longest time I went by names I didn't like because I was like 16 and picked some terrible names. Finally I settled on my sm4sh tournament tag, OgSpace. It took forever to get that changed and I can't even remember how I was able to get that changed but knowing now that I can keep changing it whenever I want to is pretty cool.