New Years Eve, Reflections of a Retail Employee

Goodbye 2021! 

Here we are, the last day of 2021. Covid is still rampaging through the lands. Just this past Thursday there were 20,000 new cases of covid in Cali. Some things never change. But we strive for a better day, and will work towards creating a healthier, better world with all those happy things. Here I'd just like to recap a couple of things about work and life that took place over this year.  

First, work has surprisingly become better, much better since the initial wave of the virus. Things are much more streamlined and there have been no employees that have come down with the virus, [to my knowledge]. As a cashier, I'm encased in a box covering me from being too close to customers. It's hard to hear what they say, but it's improved my hearing tenfold, especially hearing all the many different tones and accents throughout LA. 

The store still has its problems: not enough employees to work, customers coming in not wearing masks, no social distancing, not enough raises for employees, not enough help to get all the work done for a typical eight hour shift, disgruntled lower management having disagreements with upper management in the way they deal and manage employees and customers. As one of my line managers says, "it's a shit show." But I would say, "but the show must go on and it ain't over till the fat lady sings." 

I think the last two years of covid has really changed the way we see work in all its vicissitudes. What I'm finding is that a lot of employees and management I work with are very disgruntled about having to work retail. What can you tell these people? The sad part about it is that a lot of these young people I work with have degrees and have finished college and they're still chipping away at retail gigs like retail grocery. The short answer is that it's tough out there. Life is short and then you die. Here's a dull knife. 

Here's the way I see it personally. I don't look at my retail grocery job as something I do for money OR something that I do for fun, although it's definitely those things as well. Rather, I see my job as a reliable go-to safehouse that provides me social interaction, money, and good vibes. Why would anybody care about something as hippy dippy as good vibes, almost with the same tier as money? 

Well, I'm kind of a wild child hippy guitar kid from Wisconsin, so you might not "get it," or maybe there's nothing quite to get, but I think there's a strong lack of capacity for happiness going on super strong in this world, intensified a thousand times by the countless deaths and infections of coronavirus and stagnation in terms of careers and relationships. Believe it or not, being happy might be more important than getting rich, or getting the hottest wife, or 2.5 kids, or even gasp, a great career. Simply put, although we all will continue to strive for more and better, we all have to learn how to deal with less during the plague years. Painful to hear yes, hard to understand, no, difficult to put into real life practical experience, yes. 

What I lack in a real career over there is more experience than most other workers in retail. More experience in dealing with real people with real problems, and more experience in learning how to continue being happy on a daily basis. It ain't special and I'm no guru, but I am the philosopher in aisle 9.

I see my job as more of a social construct I've created through hard work and goodwill. I'm Orlando Furioso and I've created my own knight errantry story on the job. I'm my own character, complete with virtue, personality, and reciprocal goodwill to others I meet there. 

As I look over 2021 I think about the destruction of American institutions, government, the chaos and divide within the system, the civil war-esque aesthetic, the coronavirus killing lots of people still, new infections going on everyday, the lack of goodwill and generosity within this social construct, and you know what I get out of it? I see the world, and other people, much like myself. Nobody is completely happy and in every life in this world, there is a lot of suffering and pain. However, the cure is to keep chipping away and improving your capacity for happiness. Some people get it right away and you can see it on their face. Others are Debbie downers and try to get others to feel the same way or playing the crowd like a fiddle for sympathy. There's this magic forcefield within the universe, it's within yourself, and you can see it in others, "I am the walrus!" 

But what do I know? I'm just a grasshopper, you can tell by the way I walk. 

Live Performance 12/9/21!

https://www.facebook.com/100004840297787/videos/575826930149393

Good evening ladies and gents, 

Please take a listen and watch to our latest live performance recorded today, 12/9/2021, posted above. I did one thing that was noticeably different from our usual performances, a lot of times after playing with the pick I would lose the pick and just go pick and fingers for a more pianistic approach and softer sounds with the rhythms. This allowed Jason to stretch out more than usual, sounding almost like Eric Dolphy in a few of his solos. 

Thanks for listening

Happy holidays 

zombie apocalypse virus christmas 2021

Happy holidays, 

The holidays are here again in what I would call Covid 2.0. But I specifically was inspired to write this blog this early afternoon to describe what the working conditions have been like working grocery retail during the holidays at this current point in the pandemic. The pandemic has been going on for two years but for a lot of us, especially those of us working in retail, it seems a lot longer, stretching us workers to the point of exhaustion. Some things have gotten better for retail workers but many things have also gone south as well. Let me explain. 

The main problem we face as retail workers right now is that upper management, lower management, and customers have been giving us a lot of problems with hardly any solutions. For starters, upper management and lower management still have the same high expectations of all the employees as they have always had. The problem? It's just not feasible anymore. 

We can't keep providing the same consistent high performance or level of service because we don't have the personnel to do it or even the time during the shift. We simply don't have enough workers. There you go, if you're reading this management, know that I am right, and that you are wrong, and that your quality of service will never go back to what it once was, say three or more years ago. We simply don't have the staff to provide excellent customer service anymore. There I said it. The truth. 

Second, the customers have become much more unruly, irate, and refuse to wear masks for whatever reasons they want to yell out. Most of them are Trump types, science deniers, vaccine haters, republicans, or just simply think they're too good to wear a mask when they come into our stores. It's become a serious issue because a lot of times management won't confront these people outright. Instead, what we get is a message on the intercom throughout the store, "Please respect the people around you, please wear a mask...please." Most of the time that strategy doesn't pan out. Go figure. 

Hours are good if you're available and have seniority at the company or store that you work at. So in terms of hours and getting paid, we're doing okay, but not great. For a while, in the beginning of the pandemic we were all getting $20 per hour but it only lasted for about five months before pay resumed as normal. Honestly, we're still putting ourselves in harms way in terms of the pandemic, with this new Omicron variant, and our union has been unable to secure more hazard pay. Unfortunately. 

Which puts things in perspective because now we see many new jobs, mostly old jobs that need more workers, and they're paying their new employees $20 per hour plus great benefits. So it goes. 

The great irony about all of this is that my company is a multi million dollar company and my store is a million dollar store. They can afford to pay their employees $20 per hour, have on site security enforcing the mask mandate, to hire more employees so we aren't forced constantly to work with a skeletal crew everyday, and we can afford to give more hours to employees that need them. It isn't all bad, however, some of our customers are great people and have even helped me out in various ways. 

For example, this one customer who owns a guitar store has fixed two of my guitars for free. [hear the guitar here-https://www.facebook.com/orlando.figueroa.3150/videos/607302963652309] How about that? 

All this being said, life is what you make it. Although the job has become more stressful during this holiday season, it's still great to know that life is moving forward as normal as possible, even with the pandemic still raging inside and outside of the store every single day. 

the world keeps spinning round and round 

Live Jazz Performance! 12/2/21!

Happy Friday ladies and gentlemen, 

Check out our live performance from yesterday https://www.facebook.com/orlando.figueroa.3150/videos/607302963652309

We didn't play during Thanksgiving week and here we are back at it again. Things to note on this particular performance, I was more feeling/thinking more in the realms of rhythm, trying to think of the guitar as more of a drum, rather than a guitar sometimes when I'm strumming chords. My solos still go off into Mars here a lot, but my main focus was keeping that steady pulse. 

Thanksgiving week was tiring at work but I managed to get a lot of sleep that week and even today. Life is good! Happy holidays to you and yours. 

God Bless

Your Most Humble Guitar Player, 

O. Figueroa 

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. 

Live Music Performance 11/18/21!

 https://www.facebook.com/orlando.figueroa.3150/videos/884509442267455

Good evening, here's another live music from myself, Orlando Figueroa on guitar, and Jason Tomas on alto saxophone. 

I used my birthday guitar from my mother for this particular performance. I've used it before for our sessions, but this second time the tone was dialed in just right. There was a better bass sound, and I was able to get a lot of tonal range on certain chords in good moments using the tone selector switch. The guitar itself is a $160 guitar, as cheap as it gets, its a Rogue Rocketeer, something out of like a Sears catalogue in the 80s, but man, this guitar is actually good. Check out the tone. I use a basic Marshall avt275 amp on a clean setting, no pedals. 

For this particular performance I was focusing on my rhythm chords and really going all out on the solos in terms of off the cuff phrasing, [as I think I was trying to do lol]. Anyways, there was some great moments here, in between a lot of comping. 

Gracias por escuchar 

Live Music Session 11/11/21!

https://www.facebook.com/orlando.figueroa.3150/videos/1062070257878268

This was recorded on November 11, 2021, on my phone. Featuring myself, Orlando Figueroa on guitar and Jason Tomas on alto saxophone. 

We've been practicing together for about a year during the pandemic. We've done a few open mics but mostly we jam and record everything like a jam band. We play standards but also just do jams based on jazz chord changes in a straight ahead context. 

When performing today, I was thinking a lot about filling up the space with lots of strums, and give Jason complete melodic control with his horn. Like a drums/singer sort of combination. 

During a lot of this session I was thinking about playing in terms of a modal sort of style. The straight ahead jazz sound signature. 

I used my Jackson Dinky 6-string with a floyd rose whammy. The tone selector allows a plethora of sound options from thick full bodied tone sound, more typical of a jazz box sound, as well as allowing the other option for more clean bright chord sounds, typical of blues, funk, and rnb. Although I initially bought the guitar to be a heavy rock and roll machine, it's also come to be one of my best guitars for jazz improvisation. 

Gracias por escuchar!