Though its weekly sales amount to roughly half of what each of the other two are pulling in, one oddly colored feather in Liberty’s cap is that it is nonetheless the most profitable store. Palmyra and Southside both appear to be rising ships, with slow and steady upticks in volume, but money is nonetheless continually poured into both in the name of various improvements. Whereas, apart from utilities and its bargain of a lease, expenses are almost nonexistent at their oldest location. The Locke family likes to characterize Liberty as HHM’s reliable, if unglamorous, cash cow.
Up in college town, Palmyra, tinkering with the help remains as big a project as anything else. For starters, they’ve already made one major change up top. Edgar barely got to know the store manager, Kate, who seemed like a sweet, soft spoken, middle-aged lady, given to wearing these highly professional looking pantsuits with and without the jacket. But apparently Kate was a wee bit too fond of her pill prescriptions, if rumors were to be believed, explaining a great deal about her distantly dreamy persona. Whatever the case, though, the numbers were bad and discipline lax, so they’ve shown her the door. Corey Brown is now the new store manager.
Some bubbly blonde cashier named Samantha moves up the ladder accordingly, elevated to Corey’s old assistant manager post. This despite her young age – maybe twenty, tops – and the chirping, hyperactive maturity level to match, and having only been with this company for a few months. Not to mention that she’s already announced a pregnancy which will put her out of commission not too distantly down the road. Edgar gets the feeling that nobody else at this store particularly wanted that position, though, plus he’s noticed a persistent tendency at retail stores, for whatever reason, to consider front end people before anyone else. So Samantha gets the nod.
Elsewhere it’s basically business as usual. One of the more longstanding dramas around these parts concerns that between Dolly, the deli manager, and Nick, her meat cutter. While these two departments are separate entities at just about every other grocery operation known to man, they’ve been combined here at the Healthy Hippie, physically and financially. It’s treated as one big department, with the meat sales flowing into and under the deli umbrella. But butchers in general tend to project a macho front, that they are going to do whatever they want, thank you very much, and that certainly has not changed here. Even if reporting to a deli manager in every way except for his actual behavior.
Dolly likes to talk Edgar’s ear off – not that he’s alone in this regard – so he feels like he already knows a great deal about this dynamic. Which isn’t to say this makes these points automatically true, but her rants do tend to pass the eye test as far as what he’s seeing for himself. For example, whereas the standard with beef scraps is to toss them into tubs, separated loosely by fat content, this Nick guy just piles them up on his back cutting table, all day(s) long. Sometimes he grinds these, and sometimes they remain mounded there even after he’s punched the clock and headed home. Sometimes the pieces understandably just fall off onto the floor.
With no other employees, he’s a one man show over on that side of the case, albeit a highly entertaining one, whether speaking to or for that matter just observing the guy. This afternoon Edgar finds himself in the front office, another elevated room like that at Liberty Avenue, chatting with Corey, and even from here they can vaguely hear the deli’s stereo, at the back end of the store, above the overhead Muzak. Until that is Nick strolls over and jacks up the volume to the proverbial ceiling, it’s Zack De La Rocha screaming Fuck You! repeatedly, for he shall not do what you tell him. Up here they have clear sight lines all the way back to the deli, and can see Nick standing at the stereo, nodding and grinning at the rest of the department, his hand on the volume knob.
“Hold on a second,” Corey tells Edgar, stomps down the stairs and across the store. From this distance it almost looks like a play, albeit one with the actors muted, as he watches their distant verbal interaction, the sudden swift dialing back of that CD’s volume. Corey returns, shaking his head and telling Edgar, “I mean, I like Rage as much as the next guy, but come on…”
So Edgar’s laughing about that one for the remainder of his shift and beyond, though Dolly is becoming progressively less and less amused by her butcher’s antics. She’s patching together the meat department’s closing shifts and Nick’s days off, staffing these with random deli employees, or even with her and/or Corey cutting the meat. But the latest wrinkle, while seemingly minor, has her blood boiling, whereby Nick has apparently gone to Corey and asked if this one lazy wasteoid working back there can be transferred into the dairy department or something. Sure, the employee in question might be essentially worthless, but it’s not Nick’s place to say.
In other developments, the cops were here just yesterday. Two unfamiliar guys were trying to buy beer and, despite by appearances being well over the legal age, the cashier in question insisted upon ID anyway. It’s a touchy topic at this store, as they were fined just months ago for failing to do so with a minor. That cashier, incidentally, who must have been under the impression they were trying to pin a murder rap on her or something, never showed up for work again, failed to appear in court, and rumor has it immediately moved back to her home state of Texas.
Regarding yesterday’s pair of shoppers, though, this cashier held her ground, and these dudes went off on her. The police were eventually called to sort out this shouting match, take a couple of statements. And this episode is understandably the talk of the store today, as she’s relating it to a wave of second shift cashiers just now arriving, along with whomever else happens to be standing around.
“Come on!” one of the guys pleaded, “I’m gluten intolerant! And this is the only place I can find gluten free beer!”
Dolly’s son, Thad, happens to be the grocery manager at this location. He is also just as quick with the witty rejoinders as she, and now, hearing this cashier’s tale, he quips, “next time you should arm yourself with dinner rolls.”
There are relatives aplenty all over this company, actually, which has already gotten Edgar’s wheels turning. His parents live not too far from Palmyra and his semi-retired mom has been looking for maybe a part time job. This place could be perfect, dysfunctional or not, to paraphrase Corey. And even this dysfunction it seems is in the process of being systematically rooted out. Upgrades abound, like how the bunker type freezer section, with its sliding doors on top, like something out of a convenience store’s popsicle display, were recently yanked in favor of some brand-new upright ones. Even if Dolly is also kind of ranting now about how Corey expects her to do something productive with these mountains of discontinued ice creams, that still amounts to serious progress.
Duane swings through here often, as it’s essentially on his way home, and two of the merchandisers are on hand all day today, Christie Marsh and Arnie Greenberg. Christie oversees the deli/meat operation for all three stores, Arnie the produce. Though emailing Arnie cost updates every week, and updating a few deli prices, Edgar hasn’t had much interaction with either in person. In fact this lone shift might double that figure, or more.
Christie is pretty much in the same age bracket as Edgar, and friendly enough, if maybe a little on the flaky side. Then again, that’s par for the course in this precinct. Objectively, he supposes she is kind of pretty, if not really his type – a tall, rail thin blonde. And actually he’s already noticed that her appearance might waver on a daily basis more than anyone he’s ever worked with. One day she will show up dressed not necessarily to the nines, but in some sort of old fashioned, highly stylish outfit you might see at an upscale masquerade party – a top hat, velvet jacket, matching skirt, tons of sparkling jewelry, makeup, heels, you name it. But then the next day it’s a flannel shirt and hole riddled jeans, no makeup, hair a tangled mess, in general just looking rough around the edges.
Of course, none of this really matters. The only question is, how is her performance? In this regard, while unsure himself, everyone seems to give Christie higher marks than the woman preceding her. That woman, who Dale Paquette has already labeled as “the absolute worst” was fired not so long ago, finally busted for what many had long suspected. Deli employees and store managers had realized that whichever store they called, looking for her, she never seemed to be at any of them. Some subsequently reported that if then driving by her house, you would unfailingly find her truck parked there. But the real issue was a case of the sticky fingers. One day, she inexplicably ducked into the ladies’ room at Southside, but left her handbag on the hallway floor outside it. An observant employee happened to notice that sticking out of it was an object which sure did kind of resemble the top half of a wine bottle. Tipped off, management followed her out of the store, at which point she was unable to produce not only a receipt for the wine, but all sorts of other goodies tucked into said bag. Bye-bye.
You can’t really avoid snickers from the peanut gallery, whoever you are, particularly someone a little higher up the pecking order, and Christie certainly isn’t immune. Before even meeting the girl, he’d already heard the jokes, employees guffawing that she and Duane have a habit of showing up at the same store within a few minutes of one another (“Nick better watch it,” Dolly cracks to Edgar one day, watching the butcher interact with Christie, “flirtin with Duane’s girlfriend like that.”). Well, Edgar doesn’t know about the timing of who arrives in which store – at least she is in a store, and by appearances putting in quite a bit of work.
As for Arnie Greenberg, Edgar immediately suspected that he would hit it off quite well with this character, the first time they met. Naturally, one can argue that thinking this is a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts, but still, he does tend to develop quite the rapport with this demographic – an older Jewish guy straight from New York City, with the accent and dialect to match. His favorite euphemism, broken out at least once daily, is that such-and-such person or situation is really breaking his shoes.
Arnie gets up before dawn and drives the company truck himself to pick up local produce. They are patching this in with merchandise from a couple other major natural and organic vendors, but he sources locally whatever he can, and not only that but delivers, half the time works the product as well. This morning Edgar saw Arnie picking out exactly five cases of tomatoes to deposit here, before driving down to Southside. The truck was parked curbside in front of the store as Edgar arrived, with his laptop and folder full of invoices.
“I ordered Tara five cases of tomatoes – let’s see, yes, these will be perfect,” Arnie explains, lifting off the lid of each case as he handpicks which ones to leave here, “these have to last her all week, so I don’t wanna leave her a bunch that are too ripe…perfect, perfect…”
Arnie is somewhat hunched at this moment, with a case of the bad back, yet is a bit too maniacal not to pitch in and sling merchandise around anyway. Corey is helping him unload the truck, and Edgar volunteers to pitch in as well, even if all he really does is load about fifteen light boxes onto a boat. Meanwhile, with the store manager inside the box truck’s back end, Arnie is on the ground with a pair of shopping carts. He wants to drop off exactly fifty cantaloupes and counts out loud as Corey hands these down to him. Then Edgar wheels these into the store, back to the produce department.
“Great, great…I’m so excited!” Tara, the produce manager and possibly lone employee, cracks.
“I hear the sarcasm there,” Edgar tells her.
Tara, more than anyone at this particular location, looks the part of someone who keeps the flame alive from the original first wave of hippie activism – even if she too is roughly Edgar’s age, not nearly old enough to have participated much in the Me Decade or Summer Of Love. But this does mean, yes, she’s often found sporting the army green colored doo rag atop her head, baggy army green pants, really just army green in general. Not that this is to suggest she’s some sort of flower power pacifist. On the contrary, it turns out she’s something of a badass. As some random deli employee waltzes onto the scene – employees do a lot of that around here, aimless strolls about the store for no reason but to chat; this one is a doughy goofball named Justin, who idolizes Nick and openly admits that he hopes to replace him someday – Tara’s explaining to Edgar that she has a black belt in a couple different martial arts disciplines.
“I think you’ve got a black belt in bullshit,” Justin jokes, followed by a loud horse laugh.
“I could kick you in the head right from where I stand,” she replies, “and probably should.”
Well, Justin’s head does stay in place for the moment. But the question is, will it remain so? Rumors are swirling that Kate’s dismissal was just the first move, that management plans on doing some major housecleaning up here in Palmyra. If so, this goober’s cranium could be one of many to roll.
