For those unfamiliar with Ohio, Kroger's is a grocery store that is like Walmart's semi-retarded cousin. It used to be the king dog in the area up until the new millennium. That is when walmart came to town. Shortly after that many of the smaller grocery stores went bye bye. Big Bear which was Kroger's previous biggest competitor got blotted out like the sun when the Persian army unleashes its storm of arrows. Next to go was Hart's. Actually I think hart's went out a ways back but who the hell shopped there anyways.
Basically Kroger's kind of lingers on. They have their die-hard fans who swear you can get better deals there than if you shopped at Walmart or Meijers but I will tell you right now that is a load of crap. First off any name brand products you pay out the anus because they seem to think all that matters is their own store brand products. Back in the day these were absolutely appalling but I have to kind of admit that they have gotten better over time. Now it is to the point that I would choose the store brand over the name brand most of the time. But the thing is sometimes I don't want the store brand and if that is the case I have to pay out the ass at krogers.
I worked at Krogers in high school and let me tell you it had to be one of the worst jobs I ever had. Not because the work was hard, hell it was so easy I performed my daily job most of the time high or drunk and no one seemed to notice, it sucked because it was a joke of a job that paid minimum wage but the store managers acted like working at krogers was akin to being in the military (editor's note- that is one of the worst run on sentences I have ever seen but I will leave it there in all its glory). You have no idea how serious they took their jobs and how serious they expected you to take the job. Seriously you are going to expect a bunch of fuck up school kids to be serious and give a shit. Never going to happen. We want to party and get through high school and get to college where we can learn to party better.
I have no idea what has changed from then to now. It has been 14 years since I have worked there, which is almost half of my life which seems really really strange. I still see a couple familiar faces, sadly still being cashiers, but the real difference is in how much they do not give a shit anymore. When I worked there you had to help people out with their groceries no matter what unless they went through an express lane or they told you that they did not want help. I actually liked helping people take their groceries to their car because that was a way of earning tips.
Here is how strict they were, one time I misheard a customer and thought she said she did not want help out. So I loaded the bags of groceries in her cart and she was friendly and left. Well for some reason she must of just hated the way I looked and she called in and made a complaint that I didn't offer to take her groceries to her car. I explained to my manager that I thought that she said she didn't want help. That should of been the end of the story, an honest mix up and that is it. Nope! I got written up over that. I think they had it out for me though because my cousin who used to work there liked to call in and ask for me and when the managers got on the line he would threaten to kick their asses. Seriously I got called in the manager's office a half dozen times as they yelled at me. Told me how they did not appreciate being threatened and all that stuff. Of course I tried telling them that I didn't want my cousin to do that either. In fact my parents had to change their home number because he would call 20 times a day. He had some issues or some shit and probably still does to be honest.
So yeah they pretty much hated me something fierce and would write me up every chance they got. One time I carved my name into the break table because I was a dumbass, I mean seriously I carved my full name. Well my friend goes behind me and wrote "Is Gay" but I didn't know it was him. My natural response was to write a note and hang it up on the employee tack board that I can kick everyone in the stores ass and anyone wants to try it out come and see me. This of course got me called back into the manager's office. I got so mad I was going to quit but then I got high and finished my work day.
That also reminds me that I let this guy use my car one time on his break to smoke some weed. As I was at my register working I hear some people frantically saying that "Jason has went nuts he just tried to run over Kim". She was one of the floor managers. Apparently that guy decided to use my car to try and murder someone and I was getting blamed for it. Lucky for me there are cameras and I could prove I didn't do it. I should of kicked that guy's ass but he gave me a lot of free weed at the time so I didn't really mind. Plus I hated Kim so it didn't really bother me too much.
Whoa! I was supposed to write about the creepy people at Krogers but ended up just reliving high school. I want to be very specific I do not condone drug use in any way. While I may have gotten stoned quite a bit for about six months or so when I was 17, I have rarely ever done drugs outside of that time period. It just never took for me and for that I am glad.
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