I worked today at Family Fare. My schedule said I was working "4-?" which meant I was working from 4pm to whenever I got all of the products that came in today from the backroom to the floor. As I walked into the door, the girl working before me told me that all sorts of stuff had happened in the early shift meaning she had to cover pretty much all of the store and also meaning she didn't get anything out onto the floor. They had a bagger go back and fill the milk. When I went in and checked it out it was pretty messed up--"poorly faced" if you wanna use some grocery lingo. He'd just put whatever milk he saw onto the shelf as long as it was the same type, without looking at the expiration date. People are crazy with their expiration dates. It doesn't matter if the customer is gonna use all the milk he buys that day, if he can he'll go for the milk that lasts 10 days. He'll also dig through all the milk to get to that one bottle of milk. So yeah, milk was rather dug though, but oh well. I'm sure when they had me bag the other day that I was doing all sorts of stuff wrong.

Not long into the shift, while I was busy trying to keep Hot Pockets to the front of the shelf instead of having them slide backwards, the assistant manager told me we were out of spartan premium orange juice and that we might have some on the new load. I went into the backroom

Of course this orange juice was at the very bottom of the flat and required a lot of moving and stocking of boxes while I worked my way down.

The stocking wasn't very easy either. Believe it or not, this orange juice is in the correct spot. For whatever reason the backroom key doesn't match up with the shelf tags that our customers see. This makes stocking juice incredibly frustrating. If you find where the juice you're holding goes, you have to move other juice which is in the wrong spot. To see where that juice goes you gotta go around front to look. It's a lot of back and forth.

Orange Juice was the least of my problems. The freezer (about 5 degrees warmer than usual) was full. Knowing I was going to spend most of the day in the freezer, I went home on my lunch break and got my coat, and while I was at it I grabbed my little Sony digital camera. All photos were taken either on lunch or during one of my two breaks.

See? Full. Normally my manager helps with working the load. Usually he works 11pm-7am Saturday. He's on vacation though, all up to me.

Needless to say I didn't make much of a dent. In fact, the items in the freezer barely got touched aside from getting items to refill empty ad items. This, believe it or not, is the dairy backroom at midnight. It doesn't look like I got much done (especially because of the angle this is shot at), but I spent that entire eight hours really busy stocking and doing other job duties.

I kept working. Let me tell you, Family Fare has figured out a great way to keep their labor costs down. You can work as much as you want past eight hours but you don't get overtime. You only get overtime if you work over forty hours in a week. I'm far from that. Furthermore, for your first 90 days you're in your "orientation period" which means that you don't get the 10% discount on groceries and, more importantly, they don't pay you overtime for holidays. No surprise, I'm already scheduled for the 4th of July while everyone else is off.

I spent the last two and a half of my ten and a half hours setting out ad. There were 250 products that needed to be tagged (this is in addition to the stocking of everything in the backroom that I was supposed to have done). I got most of the items tagged before I just decided to leave once it hit 2:30AM. No worries though about not being done--the person in charge even suggested that I leave at midnight. So I guess you could say I exceeded expectations...well, except that there's a whole lot left to be stocked. I work tomorrow at noon as well, so I'll finish that then.