Here's something you might be interested in.
Ask a Hipster — Advice you didn't know you needed
Big Screen — Movie commentary
Blurt — Music's inside track
Booze News — San Diego spirits
Classical Music — Immortal beauty
Classifieds — Free and easy
Close to Home — What it’s like on the street where you live
Cover Stories — Front-page features
Drinks All Around — Bartenders' drink recipes
Excerpts — Literary and spiritual excerpts
Feast! — Food & drink reviews
Feature Stories — Local news & stories
Fishing Report — What’s getting hooked from ship and shore
From the Archives — Spotlight on the past
Golden Dreams — Talk of the town
The Gonzo Report — Making the musical scene, or at least reporting from it
Letters — Our inbox
Movies@Home — Local movie buffs share favorites
Movie Reviews — Our critics' picks and pans
Musician Interviews — Up close with local artists
Neighborhood News from Stringers — Hyperlocal news
News Ticker — News & politics
Obermeyer — San Diego politics illustrated
Outdoors — Weekly changes in flora and fauna
Overheard in San Diego — Eavesdropping illustrated
Poetry — The old and the new
Reader Travel — Travel section built by travelers
Reading — The hunt for intellectuals
Roam-O-Rama — SoCal's best hiking/biking trails
San Diego Beer — Inside San Diego suds
SD on the QT — Almost factual news
Sheep and Goats — Places of worship
Special Issues — The best of
Street Style — San Diego streets have style
Surf Diego — Real stories from those braving the waves
Theater — On stage in San Diego this week
Tin Fork — Silver spoon alternative
Under the Radar — Matt Potter's undercover work
Unforgettable — Long-ago San Diego
Unreal Estate — San Diego's priciest pads
Your Week — Daily event picks
Grocery store confidential
"I didn't know gangbangers were so particular about their salads."
The struggle is real.
Joseph, a community college student, also works at the Vons in University City — the one situated at the intersection of Genesee and Governor, anchoring the University Square strip mall whose claim to fame is Lorna’s Italian Kitchen. That is not the Vons where, a couple of years ago a guy got kicked out and returned 20 minutes later to ram his white SUV into the storefront — twice. That was the Vons on Regents Road. But Joseph’s Vons has its own stories. Joseph has been there only a couple of years, but he’s seen some things. Things you might not expect to see in an upper middle class suburban enclave tucked cheek by jowl against La Jolla.
Nobody’s driven an SUV into the store, but there has been vehicular violence. Joseph says the store has had a shoplifting problem, mostly due to kids from neighboring Standley Middle School and University City High School — and it is starting to eat away at the store’s profits. “My boss said, ‘When you see them again, kick them out.’ A few days later, he caught them stealing, and he got really mad and told them, like straight up, ‘Get out of my store.’ He kicked them out — and they did not take lightly to that.” The exiled shoplifters, shocked at the manager’s temerity, responded by taking one of the store’s mobility scooters and ramming it into (and breaking) the stone ashtray pillar outside the storefront. Because the kids were minors, there was nothing else the store manager could do except bear witness to the crumbling of the social contract that keeps civilization humming along.
What about security? Joseph says the strip mall hires security guards, but they always seem to be “on break when you need them.” Calling the cops doesn’t help — either they don’t come, or they arrive too late. And while store bans make sense, they’re difficult to enforce. As a result, you get situations like the one encountered by a new female employee whose duties included checking the rest rooms at night. Before entering the men's restroom, she knocked first. Joseph explains, “There’s some guy clearly smoking crack in there, and he's like, ‘I'll be right out.’ And then she goes, ‘Oh, no worries. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Take your time.’ She was scared. This was a new world for her. People do drugs in there all the time.”
There was a time when the cops did come. “We had an incident where this guy, a middle-aged, fat white guy, was just sitting around with a boulder and started breaking people's windshields. And I don't know what the final count of cars was, but he crushed the meat department manager’s car. I think it was both the front and the back windshield.” The cops came when they were called, “but don’t get too excited,” Joseph cautions — because the cops didn’t do a thing in the whole apprehending-the-evildoer department. Instead, they started talking to the boulder guy — “like you talk to a little kid who just got in trouble. ‘Hey, buddy, we can't be doing that. So please stop.’ And they didn't even tell him to move. They just drove off and that was that.”
Boulder Guy wasn’t a customer, which means Joseph didn’t have to deal with him. The customer is always right of course — even if the customer is a monster. “Not all the customers are impatient, demanding, and evil — just some of them,” he says, laughing. “When you tell customers things they don't want to hear, “they can lie and say that you basically freaking jumped over the counter and punched them — and get away with it.”
Or they can square up. Last year, Joseph was approached by a guy who “looked like he had just gotten out of jail.” He had tattoos on his face and “walked all tough, with the swagger and stuff.” The swaggerer then proceeded to order a salad, as swaggerers do. As Joseph prepared it, the customer started “nitpicking what I was doing. ‘No, I don’t want that, I want this.’ And he came with an attitude, and he just started yelling at me. And I'm like, ‘But you just said you wanted the cherry tomatoes,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, so now you're talking back? So now you're getting an attitude? Do you know who I am? I will beat your ass. I will kill you.’ And then he tried to square up to me, but fortunately, I was there with some friends and they had my back. I didn’t know gangbangers were so particular about their salads.”
Not that it usually goes that far. Usually, the indignities are less dramatic, more simply uncivil. Joseph recalls man — irate because he blamed Vons for the bad chicken he had served his 89-year-old mother — who made a point of documenting his complaint. “I don't feel there's a need to come up to us with a camera in our face yelling at us and saying how much we suck.” Once, he handed an order to a 50-something customer, and instead of saying “Thank you” or “I’d like to order something else,” she took offense. “She was like, ‘You're supposed to say, “Would you like anything else?” Your mother should have raised you better.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, wow.’”
Part of it, says Joseph, is that “customers feel they have the edge, they have the power. They feel perfectly entitled to just unload on you,” because a lot of them, he theorizes, “have worked these kinds of jobs before and know that if they lash out at us, we’re pretty much powerless to do anything about it.” When an impatient customer began complaining to a fellow employee “without much of a filter,” the war was on. “My boy started going off on the lady, like, ‘I was doing the trash, because that is my job, and I get paid to do my job. Do you want to come back here to watch me wash my hands?’ I was just laughing my head off.” But the customer was not amused. She grabbed her cart, turned it around and rammed it into a toilet paper display, knocking it all over the floor. Then she demanded to know the employee’s name, so she could call corporate. Word on the street, or in the aisles of Vons, was that the customer told the bigwigs that “he had sworn at her, and she accused him of drinking on the clock.”
That might not prove be a fireable offense even if were true. Employees and customers alike steal throughout the day, Joseph alleges, and nothing happens. Knives are pulled, employees are caught working under the influence — nothing happens. He’s heard about employees getting caught having sex in the cooler. “You got to hope they washed their hands. Being a union, it takes a lot to get the boss to fire you. They have to want to fire you, and then they have to put in a request to the union, and it has to approve it.” The process can take weeks, he explains. But there are ways to expedite matters. “I do have a friend who got fired because he told the store director at the time to go fuck himself. And that's all it took. The director went to corporate and did the paperwork.”
What is perhaps most remarkable is that all these events took place not at 3 am, or even at 10 pm on a Friday night, but in the middle of a random weekday — when “normal life” holds sway. He’s quick to note that most of his time at Vons is routine and eventful. But still, he’s found that his job requires him to keep his “mind active, because you always have to be aware of your surroundings — not out of fear, but more out of, ‘What's going to happen today?’”
Here's something you might be interested in.
Grocery store confidential
"I didn't know gangbangers were so particular about their salads."
Grocery store confidential
"I didn't know gangbangers were so particular about their salads."
The struggle is real.
Joseph, a community college student, also works at the Vons in University City — the one situated at the intersection of Genesee and Governor, anchoring the University Square strip mall whose claim to fame is Lorna’s Italian Kitchen. That is not the Vons where, a couple of years ago a guy got kicked out and returned 20 minutes later to ram his white SUV into the storefront — twice. That was the Vons on Regents Road. But Joseph’s Vons has its own stories. Joseph has been there only a couple of years, but he’s seen some things. Things you might not expect to see in an upper middle class suburban enclave tucked cheek by jowl against La Jolla.
Nobody’s driven an SUV into the store, but there has been vehicular violence. Joseph says the store has had a shoplifting problem, mostly due to kids from neighboring Standley Middle School and University City High School — and it is starting to eat away at the store’s profits. “My boss said, ‘When you see them again, kick them out.’ A few days later, he caught them stealing, and he got really mad and told them, like straight up, ‘Get out of my store.’ He kicked them out — and they did not take lightly to that.” The exiled shoplifters, shocked at the manager’s temerity, responded by taking one of the store’s mobility scooters and ramming it into (and breaking) the stone ashtray pillar outside the storefront. Because the kids were minors, there was nothing else the store manager could do except bear witness to the crumbling of the social contract that keeps civilization humming along.
What about security? Joseph says the strip mall hires security guards, but they always seem to be “on break when you need them.” Calling the cops doesn’t help — either they don’t come, or they arrive too late. And while store bans make sense, they’re difficult to enforce. As a result, you get situations like the one encountered by a new female employee whose duties included checking the rest rooms at night. Before entering the men's restroom, she knocked first. Joseph explains, “There’s some guy clearly smoking crack in there, and he's like, ‘I'll be right out.’ And then she goes, ‘Oh, no worries. I didn't mean to interrupt you. Take your time.’ She was scared. This was a new world for her. People do drugs in there all the time.”
There was a time when the cops did come. “We had an incident where this guy, a middle-aged, fat white guy, was just sitting around with a boulder and started breaking people's windshields. And I don't know what the final count of cars was, but he crushed the meat department manager’s car. I think it was both the front and the back windshield.” The cops came when they were called, “but don’t get too excited,” Joseph cautions — because the cops didn’t do a thing in the whole apprehending-the-evildoer department. Instead, they started talking to the boulder guy — “like you talk to a little kid who just got in trouble. ‘Hey, buddy, we can't be doing that. So please stop.’ And they didn't even tell him to move. They just drove off and that was that.”
Boulder Guy wasn’t a customer, which means Joseph didn’t have to deal with him. The customer is always right of course — even if the customer is a monster. “Not all the customers are impatient, demanding, and evil — just some of them,” he says, laughing. “When you tell customers things they don't want to hear, “they can lie and say that you basically freaking jumped over the counter and punched them — and get away with it.”
Or they can square up. Last year, Joseph was approached by a guy who “looked like he had just gotten out of jail.” He had tattoos on his face and “walked all tough, with the swagger and stuff.” The swaggerer then proceeded to order a salad, as swaggerers do. As Joseph prepared it, the customer started “nitpicking what I was doing. ‘No, I don’t want that, I want this.’ And he came with an attitude, and he just started yelling at me. And I'm like, ‘But you just said you wanted the cherry tomatoes,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, so now you're talking back? So now you're getting an attitude? Do you know who I am? I will beat your ass. I will kill you.’ And then he tried to square up to me, but fortunately, I was there with some friends and they had my back. I didn’t know gangbangers were so particular about their salads.”
Not that it usually goes that far. Usually, the indignities are less dramatic, more simply uncivil. Joseph recalls man — irate because he blamed Vons for the bad chicken he had served his 89-year-old mother — who made a point of documenting his complaint. “I don't feel there's a need to come up to us with a camera in our face yelling at us and saying how much we suck.” Once, he handed an order to a 50-something customer, and instead of saying “Thank you” or “I’d like to order something else,” she took offense. “She was like, ‘You're supposed to say, “Would you like anything else?” Your mother should have raised you better.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, wow.’”
Part of it, says Joseph, is that “customers feel they have the edge, they have the power. They feel perfectly entitled to just unload on you,” because a lot of them, he theorizes, “have worked these kinds of jobs before and know that if they lash out at us, we’re pretty much powerless to do anything about it.” When an impatient customer began complaining to a fellow employee “without much of a filter,” the war was on. “My boy started going off on the lady, like, ‘I was doing the trash, because that is my job, and I get paid to do my job. Do you want to come back here to watch me wash my hands?’ I was just laughing my head off.” But the customer was not amused. She grabbed her cart, turned it around and rammed it into a toilet paper display, knocking it all over the floor. Then she demanded to know the employee’s name, so she could call corporate. Word on the street, or in the aisles of Vons, was that the customer told the bigwigs that “he had sworn at her, and she accused him of drinking on the clock.”
That might not prove be a fireable offense even if were true. Employees and customers alike steal throughout the day, Joseph alleges, and nothing happens. Knives are pulled, employees are caught working under the influence — nothing happens. He’s heard about employees getting caught having sex in the cooler. “You got to hope they washed their hands. Being a union, it takes a lot to get the boss to fire you. They have to want to fire you, and then they have to put in a request to the union, and it has to approve it.” The process can take weeks, he explains. But there are ways to expedite matters. “I do have a friend who got fired because he told the store director at the time to go fuck himself. And that's all it took. The director went to corporate and did the paperwork.”
What is perhaps most remarkable is that all these events took place not at 3 am, or even at 10 pm on a Friday night, but in the middle of a random weekday — when “normal life” holds sway. He’s quick to note that most of his time at Vons is routine and eventful. But still, he’s found that his job requires him to keep his “mind active, because you always have to be aware of your surroundings — not out of fear, but more out of, ‘What's going to happen today?’”
Comments