You know me. Nostalgia is my middle name! Did you ever have one of those jobs, early in your work career that was just plain fun? A job, that when you think back, may have been one of the best work experiences of your life? I did. In the early seventies, for about two years, I was a stock clerk at the Weis Markets in the Whitehall Mall.
It didn’t start out good though. I started in the meat department. My job was to arrange chicken legs, thighs, and breasts on those Styrofoam trays. They had to be arranged in a certain way. I was never good with seeing a diagram, or being explained how to do something technical, and getting it right. Think of a picture of a knot and being asked to tie it the same way. I couldn’t do it! Heinz, my boss and a former German WWII soldier, was not a nice man and I frustrated him greatly. Luckily, I got out of the meat department after two weeks. Besides, it was freezing in there.
But the fun began then. We had a great group of guys, all about the same age, stocking shelves during the day while the store was open. We had our regular customers that we got to know. We had our lunches in the mall. We had our beautiful woman alert, so that not one of us was in the back room when a beautiful woman entered the store! Remember, we were all men in our late teens or very early twenties.
We had fun. There was the time when our dairy guy was filling up the dairy case when a mouse ran from the back room into his aisle. He told the mouse to “get back in there” and the mouse turned around and went into the back. There was the time I was in the aisle and opened a previously opened box of split peas, and it was filled with cockroaches which promptly ran all over the floor! I don’t want you to think that Weis was a dirty place. It wasn’t. I assume this was typical of grocery stores back then. We used to “accidentally” rip a hole in a bag of chips or cookies so we could snack all day long.
One of the stock clerks was a body builder. He had some massive shoulders and arms. But conveniently, whenever fifty pound bags of sugar were coming off the truck to be unloaded, he would disappear. We had a cardboard box baler that would crush boxes into a manageable bundle that had to be tied with metal wire. No one liked doing this, including me. We would avoid it as long as we could, which would only make the bale bigger and harder to tie! Going out into the parking lot and gathering shopping carts to make a big train, which we pushed back into the store, was great fun. We tried to always set a record for how many carts were in one train.
I can still remember some of the prices that we had to ink stamp on the packages. 33 cents for Hawaiian Punch and 29 cents for Hi-C. Baby food was 9 cents a jar! Good times.
There are more stories to tell about this job. The interesting people in produce, the women who ran the registers, and the interesting group of managers. One year our Christmas party was just a group of us drinking Southern Comfort while sitting on big bundles of paper bags in the back room. Again, good times!
I hope this post made you think about some of your early jobs and that you can think back on them fondly. Every time I go in a grocery store, and see a solid wall of cans, bottles, or boxes, my heart beats a little faster! Remembering good times.
A Semi-retired Kind of Life 