All quiet on the checkout front

This blog I think will have to go quiet on the checkout front for a while. I’ve found the good, the grim and the vicious working here and am persuaded that its worth trying to improve things.  So as I indicated last post I’m putting on my rabblerousing hat and going to try to do just that. Delicacy will be needed here and if I have to post only motherhood and applepie I’d rather not post at all.

I’ve changed over to being seasonal staff – or will once I receive the promised new contract – as I start a better paid and sociable hours only part time job in the New Year.  So I shall be working strictly Christmas, Easter and Summer only as my new position is academic terms only.

Writing work is looking up too, with new commissions luring me onwards.  And there’s a whole smalltown world still to explore.  So although I am signing off the checkout chic this is not the end of the story.

 

Health an Safety – ere wossat then.

Last Sunday I was working as usual at my checkout when my colleague at the till in front turned back to me.

“Claire, my head really hurts” she said, her neck twisted round so far that at first I thought she had some kind of inner ear disorder.  I reached over the till and caught her as she slumped, praying that the phone on my till would work and somebody actually answer it.   Fortunately I was able to get someone to come and carry her away for a first aiders attention and ultimately to hospital.

But I have to ask why this happened in the first place.  This girl is five months pregnant.  She had had some time off sick but returned to work anyway.  Statutory sick pay of £66.00 a week is far below minimum wage and doesn’t go far when you’ve a baby on the way.  Now I don’t know the full facts of her case but it bothered me enough that on Monday morning I rang the GMB.  They told me that if the Store could not offer her a safe working environment then the Store should suspend her on medical grounds.  No doubt this has not been explained or offered to her, as it involves paying her her full wages, not recording it as sick absence and not cutting into her paid maternity leave. This is all supposed to be determined through a written risk assessment. I’m told that she had just received hers. Five months into her pregnancy.

On Monday afternoon I went to work as usual.  Thats when I noticed that the fire doors at the front of the store were locked.  That is to say that the roll down metal grilles were firmly pulled down and sealed shut.  A colleague told me that the one by the bakery at the back was also locked.  So I phoned the duty manager to make sure that management were aware.  “Yes we do know and it is being dealt with” I was informed.  Well when I left the store two hours later they were still locked.  Once I reached home a swift call to the local fire brigade resolved the issue.  They were most obliging about sending somebody over (I understand it was a nice shiny red fire engine) to help the Store open its fire doors.  Apparently they are electrically operated and nobody could find the right button.  Now if the doors are locked in the evening one surmises that they are locked overnight and opened in the morning.  So they must have been locked all day, putting staff and customers alike at risk.   Colleagues who work there overnight presumably work there with the fire doors locked. 

With these kinds of Spanish practices I felt the need for a union.  Naturally we have no such luxury.  Not even a proper personnel officer in a store with 4oo employees - the last one was a glorified pay roll clerk and I am not sure that she has yet been replaced. Colleague opinion is that union membership is not allowed and the first to try to set up local representation will get the sack.  Sounds just like the kind of challenge I relish.  A real opportunity to improve things. 

 

B’s Back!

She’s not been sacked or quit after all. In fact she’s taking a new role on in the photo processing lab. So she’s had three weeks training, and a week’s residential in Bedford or whatever hinterland that such training is delivered in.

Its quite complex, she says. Not just poke the film in one way and wait for the machine to whir its magic. It seems theres actually a certain amount of alchemy that staff need to do themselves. I’d thought of applying for one of the roles in the processing centre. But since I veer on fascist about what I will put on my rather sensitive skin I didn’t fancy dabbling it in undoubtedly noxious chemicals. And now, hearing this from B I’m glad that I didn’t apply. I’m not the most dextrous of people and really don’t want to be the one that messes up your holiday pictures. Although… no, I’m terribly sorry but I’m afraid there’s really nothing we can do Madam. I do appreciate that it was your wedding anniversary and yes I quite agree that theres a lot you can do with this new technology but there really is no way to just add the top of your husbands head to the photo. Yes I know we’re new and of course you can take it to Boots if you prefer. I understand. Well I hope that you manage to get something sorted out then.

I think I’ll stick to the check out.

 

Christmas is coming, the kitty’s lookin thin

We’re approaching halloween and lurid black and orange candies are flying off the shelves alongside fluffy nylon spiderweb (flies not included) and suitably gory nasties that are such stuff as small children adore. And already we are taking deliveries of Christmas produce. Naturally I am not talking here about the ability to order a nice plump turkey, or a bombardment of sprouts. This is simply all the early vanguard of coronary inducing fat sugar and little else chocolate box pretty and occupying space that once upon a time might have held food.

In fact I’m curious to know if anyone has done a survey into the amount of what might actually be described as nutritious food rather than the overprocessed trash that is being sold in our supermarkets. By volume. To me it seems that less and less real food is being sold. By ‘not real food’ I don’t mean vegetables that have been pre chopped to save a busy worker some of the food prep, but the two aisles devoted entirely to crisps. And the next two of biscuits. No wonder there is no space left for the cheap cuts of meat that I would like to see as the staple in my new slow cooker – saving me time and helping me do more home cooking. But if the average size of our customers is ample, other things are not.

The early onslaught of Christmas brings me to thinking about the bonus. Our employer must have a crystal ball as they have the novel approach of posting the amount of bonus available at the beginning of the year, and reducing it as loss and waste nibble away at it. Its meant to encourage us to be careful. Thinking ahead to try to budget I wondered aloud to a colleague what sort of sum it might be. Nothing that you would notice was the acid reply. Someone else elaborated. No bonus has been paid for a couple of years now, despite the notices up about it. Store refits have eaten it away. Well I guess somebody has to pay for the shiny new stores. Ours is the latest one to be buffed up. Its almost finished now but has been the usual story of mismanagment and dealing with customers furious about the difficulty of locating products that always used to be by the milk, taking three times as long to do their shop, who only came in for the product currently unavailable. So same old same old and no bonus neither.

 

There’s something rotten in the Store at…

…well perhaps I had better not say. After all I do value my job and am sure that the Store would not take kindly to anything other than motherhood and applepie PR. Still there is definitely a problem at one of the stores local to where I work. Simply put, I know of at least two people who weren’t been paid their wages for three months. The excuse of a payroll computer problem hasn’t cut it with them and they no longer work there. A couple of customers have unpromptedly mentioned that that particular store is not well run, staff do not know what they are doing and the shelves are badly stocked so they travel a bit further to get to ours. Correlation may not prove causality but I think thats a finer point in this instance.

Curious if such things could happen at our store I asked some colleagues about this. A little hedging and denial that anything so inept could happen and a decided uncomfortableness that smacked of a visit from the thought police. Not at our store was the firm message I received. Still this definitely lies within the gap I’m finding between the corpspeak and reality.

 

Your store needs YOU!

Actually the notice doesn’t say that. It says do you really need to be off sick? Its large and pink and on the wall. Our employer takes absence very seriously, as I discovered.

Now on Sunday morning I had food poisioning. The kind where you really don’t want me to be touching your dinner. So, the requisite two hours ahead of my morning shift I phoned in sick.

“Have you been to the doctors?” was the brusque question.

“No, I know whats wrong with me, its food poisoning.”

“When are you likely to be back”

“I expect I shall be in for my evening shift tomorrow, its probably a 24 hour thing.”

“Well ok then.”

That was pretty much it. Plenty of suspicion that I was faking it or hungover, no expression about hope you feel well or anything approaching humanity.

The following day, recovered I returned to work. So it was somewhat of a surprise when the phone rang on Tuesday morning.

“I want to speak to Claire.” (no please, no greeting)

“You’re speaking to her. May I ask who’s calling?” (naturally I had a fair idea.)

“Its X. Are you better now?”

“Yes, actually I was back in work yesterday.”

“Oh, were you? I’m sorry. Well when are you next in?”

I told her and was fully expecting to have a ‘back to work’ interview when I returned. Still I went in as normal and nothing was said. In fact nothing was said until a week later when I was called in for a so called back to work discussion. From what I recalled of my corporate induction, the purpose of these interview are supposed to be twofold. To see if you are properly fit for work, if the Store can do anything to help you, and to discourage people taking sickies. I wasn’t sure how an interview a week after an absence could possibly fit with the former objective. So I asked if this were a disciplinary interview.

My manager was a little taken aback. No, its not. And she proceeded to explain the procedure, ticking off on the form she had that I had understood the procedure. That absence was taken seriously so each absence had a back to work interview. If there was too much absence it would be investigated – which seemed fair enough – and counselling offered by the manager. I blanched slightly at the thought of counselling from someone with the apparent people skills of a Rhino but signed the form, checking that the “this is not a disciplinary matter” box was ticked. As the manager said.

“Its all in your handbook.”

Now that part of the handbook seems to have escaped into the wilds of my loft office, but the way one day of absence was handled was perfectly clear that no matter the gloss the process is about bullying staff to ensure that they come into work no matter what.

 

If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands.

Or make sure at least that you have your smiley happy face on. On the way up the stairs to the staff locker room a bland yellow blob of an icon that once adorned acid tablets confronts you to remind you that smiley and as bland and as unappealingly docile as blamanche is what our management prefer.

This is not what my friend, I’ll call her B, is like. Now after many years as a nurse B has decided to change career and is currently studying for a Masters in Sculpture at Birmingham University. In other words she uses glass to make great big arty things. B is a cheerful pleasant colleague and well liked by customers. But one day B forgot her name badge. Oh horror! So B read the big notice. “No badge No Entry” it said in large red letters. More cheerily underneath it exhorted her to pick one out of the basket. So she did and happily trotted off out to her checkout.

A short while later and the Store Manager, with steam fizzing from his ears orders B up to his office for a telling off. The naughty girl had not changed the name on the badge to her name. B tried to say that the notice didn’t say that (she is correct, it doesn’t). She didn’t continue – as she might have done – to say that most jobs that require you to wear a name badge don’t care what the name on it is. But her real crime was that she contradicted – and is probably brighter than – a manager. Now I was looking for B as having come back from holiday in Las Vegas I’d taken a photo of the Dale Chihuly ceiling in the Bellagio Hotel for her. We were talking about Chihuly last time we spoke and I thought she might like a photo. But I can’t find her. Nobody seems to know anything about it but I suspect that one way or another poor old B was not the perfect cookie cutter fit here.

 

Of Police and Firemen

Back from holiday and like the customers, relieved of their brats now that they are in the custody of schoolteachers, I am in a relaxed mood. My first shift proved diverting. First of all a young couple approached the checkout clutching a bottle of vodka and little else. He looked decidedly fresh faced and I asked him for some identification. Howling with laughter he presented me with a police ID card. Whoops. Fortunately he and his missus saw the funny side of it too, and my colleagues were able to extract much humour from all those ‘policemen looking young means you are getting old’ jokes.

We had just stopped chortling when an alarm sounded. Nobody seemed sure exactly what to do at first, then eventually the order came along the checkouts, relay fashion, to evacuate the store.

“Oh, but can’t you just (risk burning to death to) get my shopping scanned through first?” asked my customer.

Well she didn’t actually say the part in parentheses. Even customers have some limits. Still I thought a very little forethought on her part would have been courteous. It took longer than I expected to get out through the crowds hesitantly milling through the doors and out, something to remember if I am ever in a store when the alarm does go off.

The day was nicely sunny outside and we rolled our sleeves up to expose as much skin as decently possible to the reflected glare from the carpark tarmac. After all, a paid for tan is not to be sneezed at. The fire engines rolled up gleamingly scarlet and satisfyingly dramatic. Disappointingly however the crew visible from our roll point were all female. Even if the end verdict was a faulty oven it was still better than your average shift. And there was the entertainment of returning all the contents of the abandoned trolleys to the shelves in the pleasingly quiet aftermath. Now where’s that fire alarm button again…

 

Forbidden fruits

Young people are protected by a plethora of legal restrictions over what they can and cannot buy depending on their age. There is a constant debate over what the age should be for each of these fruits of good and evil, as exemplified by the recent decision to raise to 18 the age at which you can be sold noxious drugs like tobacco. There is also debate over what is good and bad for us and why. Life would be much simpler if Eve had been quick enough to scrump from both trees.

Whatever the reasons may be for forbidding certain apples to our young people, there is a much less noisy debate about what exactly constitutes these various fruit. Actually what constitutes healthy and junk food is the only area I can think of where public discussion is above the radar. Perhaps this is because our knowledge in this area is so recent that definitions are not yet fixed and decided. Nonetheless a much quieter discussion is going on over po.no.raphy. There have been some moves in government to remove material that we consider unsuitable for small children from their reach. That is to say, to put it to the top shelf rather than as it currently is, positioned at their eyelevel somewhere below their comics. This debate is allegedly quiet because the best selling daily newspapers – The Sun and the News of The World – contain material that by any definition is p.r.ographic. Indeed until very recently my till flashed and beeped a warning when one of these formidable redtops was scanned to ask whether the would be customer was old enough to peruse such material. Now, like the debate, it has gone silent whilst they are whizzed through. I can find no reporting on this surely not insignificant victory for tabloid reputation and profit on either their sites although the Torygraph, Grauniad and BBC have been following the story. However it surely these red topped arbiters of truth and light would not let their conflict of interests interfere and can be relied upon to report fairly and accurately on whether their content is fit for the same children for whom they whip up witchunts of ‘paedos’ in order to ‘protect’.

 

I’m a customer (I’m always right)

It seems an enduring fashion to bewail the state of the modern world. People such as Lynne Truss have even published books on the subject of its rudeness. Not that we ever consider any of this from a viewpoint other than that of ourselves as the poor victim of the said ills. Now today I politely asked goodness knows how many customers how they were. Less than one in twenty of them had the courtesy of to ask me in return how I was. Around one in twenty didn’t even bother to acknowledge I had said anything at all.

I wonder if some of the more unpleasant features of modern life are due to our ever-increasing tendency to view ourselves simply as customers. Customers who by virtue of their wealth have the right to all the resources of the world that can be pillaged. Customers with the right always to be right. Customers who if are not appeased can flounce off and take their business elsewhere. If people don’t do what we want – politicians, other people’s children, the taxman – then we throw tantrums and threaten to emigrate to the great Abroad where life is always better. Nurse didn’t do what you want? You can hit her; she’s still required to treat you as you waive any responsibility for whatever reason seems most appropriate to your lawyer. Well I’ve had enough. I’ve lasted a mere six weeks at the frontline at the till. Its not so much the boredom of the job, it’s the utterly unbearable rudeness of people like you and me. I’m planning to leave whilst I still care.