Wednesday, November 26, 2008

No good deed goes unpunished......

And I did my good deed for the holiday season. A few weeks ago I volunteered to help out downstairs. Okay- I volunteered to help sack groceries at Whole Foods at our Lamar Store for Thanksgiving. And words aren't helping me here but I smile as I type. In one word, respect. I have found that working in a grocery store is not easy at all. But the people are amusing and pretty awesome at Whole Foods. It's an energetic and eclectic feel in Austin.

Let me try to walk through the four hours I spent downstairs with Jackie and Jen.

2:00 pm We are elated to get to put on our aprons and name tags! About to hit the floor and get trained on how to sack groceries! Eeeek!
2:10 pm Not so much training but jump on a register and go. My hands were sweating. Also, the valet system that carries the groceries downstairs to cars and the belt was quickly shown to us. It's a fancy way to deliver groceries to you without you having to carry them yourself. Genius. This was actually quite scary,in my opinion. I was hoping to not ever have to deal with this "system", just bagging groceries was fine with me and hard enough. Irony,....


2:30 Laura and Jackie were bagging groceries when the customer wanted to use the valet system. Awesome. J and I were carrying the bins over to the belt, which was apparently off. Meaning I had to go downstairs to turn it on. Panic. A guy in floral watches me and takes over. Sigh of relief. Until, we get downstairs and I find out he has never turned on the belt either. I'm like, what?! Don't you work here? We figure it out and down the groceries come. Thank gosh. Now I just had to wait a couple of minutes.


2:42 Still waiting. Now. Ivory, an employee of WF for four years, has joined me and we were having a fun conversation. Then she noticed someone had put the rotisserie chicken on top of the eggs (that would be me) and quickly goes into a frenzy to make sure the haven't been cooked. I tell you what, customer service, I saw it in a new light in this experience.


2:50 We call upstairs, where is the customer?!!??!? I'm thinking, is this normal? Ivory explained people sometimes forget their groceries? I mean really? Can people really spend $400 on groceries and forget them? Apparently.


3:00 Still waiting. Until, the nice lady in the Mercedes drives up and explains her car had broken down and her husband was now with her. He had to leave work. Point of the story- don't use the valet in your first 30 minutes on the job.
3:20 Upstairs bagging groceries again. Jackie and Jen though I'd gone MIA and back to work probably. Jackie quickly explains she was asked to " go front the olive oil". What the heck does that mean? Let me tell you, straighten the shelves. I learned how to straighten pancake mix, cereal boxes, jars of spaghetti, name it. I know where it is. Or not...getting to it.
3:30 The questions begin. Apparently, if you have on an apron you know everything. Like why we move groceries around and they are never in the same spot. Or shown scars in strange places that vitamin E should be put on. Mince meat in a jar, where does that go? And crystallized ginger, well after 15 minutes, I figured this out.
3:44 Explaining to every single person that asked me a question that I don't work here. Well here but upstairs. This led to more confusion. Then I started grabbing people that could find out.
4:00 My feet hurt, do we really have two hours left? Did I really run a marathon? How come it hurts to be on my feet?!

4:02 ONLY TWO MINUTES? Seriously?

5:00 Thank you Catherine Weiss for talking to us for ten minutes. This helped.

Truthfully, the last hour dragged. And I wanted to call my boss to go back upstairs. I appreciate the job I have and the work that the team members at Whole Foods do. I am a wimp compared to the store employees. The funny thing, I went to pick up Lanes from daycare and she did not want to sit in the car seat. So we went back up to the store. And shopped for Thanksgiving as a customer and not an employee.

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