Confessions of a teenage grocery clerk

As I've mentioned here before, I spent most of the summer working at a Food Basics grocery store. While we didn't end up going out on strike (we got a new contract where retroactive pay basically meant I made more per hour in 2007 than in 2008), I did learn a few things, which I will share here.

The big story of the summer was the lemon juice shortage.

What's that?

You never heard of the lemon juice shortage?

Well, yeah. It was kind of weird.

I started work in the first week of May. We had lemon juice. Lots of it, in fact (we had been building a display for, as with most of our displays, no particular reason). By maybe May 20th, the display was starting to shrink, and we were starting to notice that although we'd been ordering plenty more lemon juice, it hadn't been coming in. And not only that, the other brand had been empty for a while, hadn't it?

By late June, all our normal lemon juice was gone, and I was directing customers to the imported aisle as our last remaining bastion of lemon juice. It was at this time that I learned from one customer how serious the problem was - we were the fourth store she'd been to - and that the problem stemmed from some trouble they were having in making the concentrate.

By mid-July, we were out of *all* lemon juice, and there was nothing we could do about it. Another week or two passed and it was affecting foodservice distributors, apparently outages were expected through September.

But then, in my last week of work, lemon juice re-appeared. And the story ended.

I also spent a disturbing amount of my work time looking at signs on displays. A few years ago, a display of kitchen cleaner bore a 'Kitchener Cleaner, $0.97' sign for well over a month without anybody seeming to notice.

There was nothing quite that good this summer, although I did see signs for "Nestle Sundays" (sundaes) and - my personal favourite - "Tropical Groove Drinks". The drinks are actually branded as Tropical Grove.

Sticking with the Tropical Grove, they win my award for 'best repackaging'. Once upon a time, their drinks came in 12-packs of little glass bottles. A little over a year ago, they downsized to 9-packs, still glass. Sometime in the past year, they changed that to nine plastic bottles - worse for the environment, but a lot less likely to break and cause a big mess.

The runner-up in that category would be the makers of Tang drink mix, for cutting their cases (the ones that contain the boxes that get sold in the store) in half, from 48 boxes to 24. Nobody buys Tang, so this was much appreciated.

I also learned that I go to the same school as the girlfriend of my store's weekend Frito-Lay merchandiser. This isn't particularly exciting, but I felt like I needed at least one more item.

--Ryan

P.S. A new school year, two elections in the next two months, the end of the baseball season, and Google Chrome? I can guarantee that the stuff that doesn't really interest anybody (such as the above) will be kept to a minimum for the next while.