What 10 Years in the Grocery Business Taught Me About Humanity
Positives, negatives, and plain old weirdness
Everyone goes to the grocery store. Rich, poor, black, white, brown, healthy, sick, sane and insane.
Everyone.
I started my grocery experience after my first year of college. Bringing home a 1.65 accumulative GPA and being put on academic suspension pretty much sealed the deal with my parents. “If you’re not going back, you’re not sitting around here. Get a job.”
I never shied away from work, so it wasn’t as harsh as it sounds. I simply lost my mind being away from home. Instead of studying the books I studied booze, weed, and frat parties. I got a 4.0 in 1980’s party life.
I started working part-time in the video department at Albertsons where I’d spend the next 10 years. Eventually, I went full-time while popping in and out of college. I worked at six stores in three cities, exposed to a vast rainbow of different demographics.
Stores backed up to country clubs, next to highway underpasses’ with large homeless populations, in middle-class suburbia, and in extremely high crime impoverished neighborhoods. I was in the majority and the minority. Through this experience, I received my degree, a Bachelor’s of the Good, Bad, and Ugly of…
