So I’ve mentioned before that I’ve worked overnight stock for Giant. If there was one thing I eternally hated about the job, it was having to “Face” the products. This was made even more fun by the fact that my hands aren’t exactly small. So it was a ton of fun, especially when working with items that barely fit in the row they were in. See, you had to bring forward 2 pieces of merchandise to the front of the row. Because I guess otherwise people would think that we were sold out of that item?
It was easily the worst part of the job. First off, if your in the aisle with Ketchup and don’t SEE your brand of ketchup at the very front of the row, aren’t you going to take a peek and see if maybe there’s some pushed back? 90% of the time when you go to the grocery store, especially after 10 or 11, most of the products aren’t faced anymore anyway. You would have to be an idiot to not realize whatever your looking for is no longer there just because you can’t “see it”.
But it would be the end of the world to the higher ups if we didn’t face merchandise. You know, because we were actually trying to get EVERYTHING out and on the shelves that came in. But I guess looking pretty > having product on the shelves to buy. Then again everything about the company was ass backwards anyway. Since most of the bosses didn’t get in until 10 AM (it’s nice being in charge) they would complain that we didn’t put enough water on the shelves during the summer. Needless to say if they came in early they would see we stocked plenty of water, just the contractors bought it all up and no one else would stock the shelves. Despite us leaving a note and all the water by the doors to the floor.
I think they just loved to blame the night shift for everything, since we got something like an extra 75 cents for working overnights. For anyone that’s worked overnights before, that 75 cents really isn’t worth the level of frustration involved in working overnights. Changing your sleep cycle so that you sleep during the day is the absolute worse. Plus everyone loves to call you when your asleep, conveniently forgetting that you work at night. To top it all off? One time I put my head down to fall asleep, and a god dam parade came down the street.
I worked for Target in NJ along the shore as seasonal overnight for Christmas. Its easily tied with Giant as my worst job held. Funny enough both jobs were working as Overnight Stockers.
I hated it, but then again when your having your initial training and the Security Manager points you out as most likely to steal, it can get annoying quick. The only reason he pointed me out was due to my NY accent.
The overnight manager was a complete Jerk. Even with 90% of the staff complaining about his choice in music he refused to change the radio station. It was a 50s classic station with an auto dj doing the overnight shift. So you’d hear the same songs every night, just in a different order. This was made even worse when the station turned into an All Christmas Song station THE WEEK BEFORE Thanksgiving. They managed to make the music selection even more limited.
Of course when the Yankees made the world series, we had to listen to every game of the 2000 world series. Which since we were on the border of NYC Radio broadcast sounded more like Static then baseball. He would also make baseball refrences constantly which got annoying. He was one of those Jersey Yankee fans who only became a fan once they started winning again. And he was always going on and on about how good his son in Little League was.
He would bitch if you took too long to do an aisle, but if he didn’t like you he would nit pick your aisle to death about everything not being exactly where it should if you got through the aisle fast. He once complained because I emptied out the lifestyles furniture pallet. He always did it and took forever, so I told him it was my mistake and offered to do the aisle. When I got it done in about half the time it took him, he went nuts trying to find somewhere I screwed up and never let me do the Aisle again.
What eventually got me fired is that I was doing the board game wall. We would get 2-4 pallets a night of board games and I had the wall memorized within a week. Since it was always impossible to find a working scanner I just did the wall off of memory for about a month and a half. One night I got a really oddball game that I hadn’t seen before and got a friend to scan it. I didn’t realize my boss was the next aisle over and I proceeded to get bitched at about not using a scanner. The next night he decided he was going to show me a thing or two and do the board game wall by himself. I heard him ranting the whole time of how they don’t need a person to just do the wall. About halfway through the night I could hear him cursing and yelling and having to get extra help because the wall was setup oddly. Instead of starting at 1 and ending at 1000 running across the whole wall, the numbers were broken down into 3 sections, Children’s Games, Toddlers games and adult games. So if #1 was at the top right, it would move towards the left until the end of that section and drop down to the next row.
I hated my whole experience at Target, but I only dealt with one manager who was just an insanely huge douchebag. Also the Target I worked at only hired overnight people during Christmas. For the rest of the year they kept the full time people at nearly 10 hours a week, and when one of them tried to get partial unemployment they yelled at them for it All the people that were there year round seemed really miserable.
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