Yesterday At The Deli

Saturday was yet another day at my place of work, the supermarket deli.

Don't you just love dealing with customers? I sure don't. Angry ones, sad ones, dumb ones, old ones, fat ones, non-english speaking ones... Beyond these surface attributes I've actually found that you can tell a lot about a person just from a one minute meeting over a deli counter. Yesterday there was one woman who changed her order once she realised that another item was on special for $2 less per kilo. Having ordered just under 100g, she basically just let a decision in her life be dictated by less than 20 cents. Congratultions, you are a slave to the retail industry.

The first thing I got yesterday when I went in was my pay-slip: let's face it, money is the only reason I'm still there. You don't work at Countdown because it's fun. And as I check that my $1.50 an hour has been processed, I notice an envelope stapled to the pay slip. Out of both intrigue and, having clocked in, wanting to delay starting work itself I open it and read it carefully. Apparently I am to reply ASAP with regards to attending a meeting next wednesday from 3pm to 4pm. My boss is well aware that I attend school and yet poses me with this question. How the hell, may I ask, do I get to work by 3pm if my final class couldn't possibly finish before 3pm? I have to go home get changed, walk to work and, even if she assumes I driver there, by then that's 20mins at least. Is she suggesting that I leave school early to attend a deli training course?

I check the clock. 3 minutes down. No customers served. No ham shaved. Score. In a further attempt to delay starting work I move on to the desk which has notices and stuff and see a folder labelled "Hot Chicken Excellence Awards." Apparently they're running some sort of competition between stores (to boost they're profits of course) to see which store can improve their hot chicken sales in the next 3 months by the biggest percentage. Knowing that we're all a bunch of nimrods with no goals in life they think we will actually be excited by something as condescening as "Hot Chicken Excellence Awards." First prize? A voucher for $100 that has to be spent in store. So basically, the company has decided that they can boost their profits by dangling a prize which costs them nothing in front of the faces of dumbass employees who get excited by "Hot Chicken Excellence Awards." Smart move. I hear some stores have begun strategising.

Finally I have to work. Rows of impatient customers line the other side of the counter. I try to sneak by, procrastine somehow by checking the temperature of...whatever, but suddenly I find myself being helplessly drawn forth as they lock their evil stares upon me as if threatening to eat my kidneys with fafa beans. And then it begins, another day of customers from hell. 22 months of this has allowed me to compile a list of absolutely 100% true examples of...

Things I hate:

If a customer asks for 300g of pastrami for example, and I grab some pastrami and it flukishly comes up as exactly 300g, it pisses me off how the customer nearly always patronisingly congratulates me, as if they this is the highlight of my day. Fuck you.

Customers who have never heard of weighing something to gauge how much more I need to get to fulfil their order. Sticking with the 300g of pastrami example, I may put on a handful which comes up as 187g. Clearly this is not 300g. What do I hear? "I want more than that." No shit, lady, I'm not bloody finished yet.

Customers who think I care for the store that I work in. "Have you got any of the Normal ham?" a woman asks as she looks down upon the apparently "abnormal" (Smoked) ham with a crinkled nose. "No, this is all we have at the moment, sorry," I reply. "Fine! I'll go next door to Foodtown then!" Did I just miss something? I'm sure this woman just tried to make me as pissed off as she was by saying she'd go to another store. One less snooty customer to deal with, damn. Oh, and Foodtown and Countdown (where I work) are owned by the same company, just for the record, so it really makes no difference which one she buys at even if I did care.

Pedantic customers. When they order 300g of pastrami, they mean THREE ZERO ZERO. "Not 301, not 302, 300!" another lady screams at me. This actually happens on a regular basis. Bloody ridiculous really, if whoever invented the metric system had designed it differently, what we believe to be 300g could well be 302g and she'd want that instead.

Old people. I hate them. There are some who are nice, I'll give them that, but the majority are assholes. There was one old lady who pointed at some chicken and said "Can I have that ham at the front?" I tell her that it's chicken, and then her husband arrives and she suddenly says "He won't let me have what I ordered!" And then the husband got pissed off until I told him to calm down and explained what I had said. Then there was this old guy who was staring down at the luncheon and salami for AGES. So I went over and asked "Can I help you, sir?" He replied: "In what way?" I say: "Can I get you anything." Now the man gets angry. "Look, If I want something, I'll ask for it!" Yeah, that's why I came over here, dumbass. So that if you wanted something you could ask for it. There's no good asking for it if I'm twenty meters away. And better yet: Since when did "Can I help you" morph into the statement "I'm getting you something whether you like it or not." I was just asking the bastard a question which would help no-one but himself if he had wanted to order something.

The biggest pet-hate of mine are the people who believe that a pre-requistite for working in a deli is psychic abilities. "Can I have some ham?" they ask. Well done. I now have no idea what type you want or how much. And they just stand there and expect me to get it until I prod them into giving me more information. Some Ham? SOME HAM?! There's shaved ham, low-fat shaved ham, smoky ham, peppered ham, bone-drawn ham, regal ham, carved leg ham, honey-baked ham, ham pieces, champagne ham, ham and chicken luncheon, low-fat ham and chicken luncheon, sandwich ham.... Sure, I'll pick out the exact one you're thinking of because of my world-renowned mind-reading abilities. Sometimes I don't ask them anything else, and grab a random ham to make a point, and then they're actually SURPRISED when it isn't the one they wanted.

The unnecessary interferers get on my nerves. I put 299g of their 300g order of pastrami onto the weighing machine and they say "That's fine, that's fine." 1. I'm not going to add 1 gram of something if I'm off by that much, so there REALLY isn't any need to say anything. Nice of you to presume that I'm as pedantic as you. 2. One thing I've noticed is that every single person seems to believe that if they are giving an instruction they have to say it twice. I get people who change their mind and decide they want less and say "just stop there" and then, due to minimum human reaction time I pause before putting the next handful of pastrami back into the container, so they say it again "That'll be fine." Over time this one pisses me off more and more.

Lastly, I've recently had to deal with Bart. Bart's the new guy. He arrives 30 minutes late for every shift - last week it was an hour - he mucks around, throws food at fellow employees, eats the meat we're supposed to be selling when he thinks no-ones looking and smokes marijuana on his breaks (I shit you not). Every week he asks me if I want to play whatever game he has thought up. One time it was "first person to sell a customer something they didn't ask for without them noticing." Sometimes he skips the games and tells me his fantasies about "what if they let every Countdown employee just go nuts and do whatever they want in the store for a night and drink all the alcohol and smoke and party and shit like that." But if I listen he stops throwing food for a while so I guess there is some advantage of putting up with him.

Overall I guess this job kinda sucks. But, it does grow on you after a while. Then again, so do tumours and fungus.