Working on the Night Crew

Another Trip Down Memory Lane

Grocery clerk stocking shelves - Image courtesy of Substack’s AI Image Generator

We were the Night Crew, the invisible staff that restocked the grocery shelves while the world slept. We were the young men willing to sacrifice a good night’s sleep if we could avoid interacting with the customers, do things our way, and earn that extra fifty cents an hour for working ungodly hours. We lived in a world of constant mental fog because very few really mastered the ability to sleep during the day. A few were able to find a room dark enough and had the self discipline to sleep while everyone else lived life. Most of us, though, would live on 4 or 5 hours of broken sleep until we could go no longer and then would crash so hard that an earthquake could not have been strong enough to awaken us. We were the Boys of Night and I was the fearless leader, too young and dumb to know what I didn’t know and ultra motivated to make my mark in the world.

Those were the days, I mean nights, that taught me to drink coffee. It was a necessity for survival back then rather than the pleasant part of the morning ritual that it is now. One of the stores had a coin operated coffee machine that would give you a steaming cup of something akin to coffee for the small price of a quarter. The rest of the stores I worked at allowed us to make coffee in the deli. Compared to the modern brews of today, it was still some pretty bad stuff but we didn’t know any better and you could doctor it up with enough sugar and packaged cream to make it serviceable. Compared to the “cowboy coffee” my Dad used to make, it was pretty good stuff and I was soon drinking it black – not because I liked it but because I was always in too big of a hurry to doctor it up.

You could usually tell how productive each individual was going to be by how they walked in. I had a few guys that were always bouncing off the wall. They would usually be good for at least half the night. Sometimes 4 am would roll around and there was no bounce left in them but they would be hell on wheels until then . The ones that plodded into the store with their head down and shoulders stooped would actually be okay. They were lost in thought, probably wondering what the hell they were doing with their lives, but they would be okay. The guys that walked in, staring straight ahead and oblivious to the world around them were the ones you had to worry about. They were operating in a state of mind just above sleep walking. I knew it would take a small miracle and a lot of that coffee machine sludge to keep them from becoming something akin to horror movie zombies. It was my job, being the supreme leader that I was, to convince them all that they weren’t all just sleep deprived fools. We were the Swashbucklers of the Aisles!

The first two hours on the load days were dedicated to pulling the load out of the backroom and onto the sales floor, dropping each pallet as close to the appropriate aisle as possible. Then came breaking each pallet down into stacks of product that would be taken into the aisles with two wheeled dollies. Those first two hours were the toughest. First of all, you had to jump start your lethargic body into motion and then you had to push it to the point of exhaustion. These two hours were critical to the overall productivity so you had to push yourself . If it ever took more than two hours to get everything broken down and distributed, you were going to be behind all night. It it went too well, I would be fighting to keep the team from feeling like they could relax because they suddenly had bonus time. When everyone finished breaking the loads done, we would head for the coffee. That is where I learned to grab and go, no sugar, no cream. While the crew was talking about their sleep deprivation, their days’ activities, or their hate for the job, I had to go count the cases in the aisles so that I knew what each guy was responsible for. The rest of the night, I would be spending a lot of time looking at my watch and mentally calculating cases per hour because we had standards we had to meet (40 cases per man hour before register scanners, 60 cases per hour once we had register scanners),

When I finished an aisle of my own, I would take a quick walk to make sure everyone else was on schedule. If not, being the great leader that I was, I would offer some encouragement, tell them how far behind they were, and implore them to make up time. I would run through the aisles giving the other guys high fives and thanking them for their efforts because, in most cases, I knew that I would need those guys to continue their over achieving because it was a pipe dream that the Walking Zombies would catch up. On the nights when we all were under-performing, I just steeled myself for the tongue lashings and calculator shenanigans that occur when the store management arrived the next morning. They would want to go over every guy’s case counts and times and I would have to explain just what the heck had happened during the night. They didn’t seem to like the “We were sleepy” response so I had to come with my best situational spins, hoping for the best. I just tried to avoid a trend developing for any one member of the team because negative trends led to verbal and written warnings and I hated giving those out. Some managers live for the disciplinary moments. I never did. I did learn, though, that you could turn those teachable moments into times when you could earn people’s respect and loyalty. There is a fine art to calling someone on the carpet and having them leave the room feeling like you were really on their side. You could be disappointed and demand more while still believing in the individual and celebrating their strengths.

In the days before scanners, most of us carried some sort of little tool box with our ink stampers, extra razor blades, extra rolls of pricing gun tape, tape for around our cuticles, and our feather dusters. Even with that, however, there was always someone who could be found wandering the store at some point, looking for something the rest of us either had in our apron pockets or our “tool boxes.” It was easier to find your productivity niche in those early days because there were so many facets to the job. Some guys could use their Garvey ink stampers to price the canned goods faster than everyone else. Others could use their pricing guns faster than the average stocker, finding the right mix of speed and rhythm that kept the gun from jamming up. A jammed up pricing gun was guaranteed to put you in a productivity hole. Other guys, like myself, became masters with box cutters. You learned to place your thumb right over the blade to serve as a guide as you pulled the blade toward you. With practice, I became fast enough to burn blisters on my thumb, requiring even more taping. Most retailers have banned those old box cutters but they were the some of the best tools ever made in my opinion. I became very well known for spending most of the night with one clamped in my mouth like a pirate on the stormy seas.

In the earliest days, we had to rely on somebody bringing in a boom box for our music. Some guys would bring in something loud enough to hear through out the store – if you wanted to. Other times we took the receiver from the intercom system, taped the transmit button down, and played it over the intercom system. The sound quality was pretty poor but beggars couldn’t be choosy. When Bob Seger’s “Against the Wind” album came out, I bought it on cassette and played it for the guys over and over and over again. I am not sure that was my finest leadership move but they tolerated it. When you are sleep deprived, perhaps, you just stop realizing that you are being subliminally tortured in some way. For the record, though, that album was one of the very best!

We did a lot of crazy things during the night, things that would have gotten us all thrown out of the store if we lived in the modern age of cameras everywhere. Sometimes, if we were running ahead of schedule, we would push all of the clothing racks aside to create a miniature football field and break out one of the Nerf footballs. There may or may not have been some things broken (even a overhead florescent bulb one evening) and many a manager wondered why the clothing racks weren’t exactly where they were the night before. Then there was standing up inside grocery carts or on top of flat top carts so that we could “face” out the top shelf without getting up and down off of step stools. That top shelf had to look like an flat skyline, don’t you know? It was easier just to prop ourselves along on a cart of some sort but it would have had OSHA filing reports and threatening to shut us down if there had been cameras around.

In the morning, after we had cleaned up the store, had all of the aisles looking like a perfect “sheet of glass” with wonderfully even “skylines” and not a speck of dust on anything, we would head for our cars. We would be more disheveled, sweaty, dirty, and delirious than we were when we got there but there was a bounce in our steps because most of the time we would be heading for a bar that served breakfast and offered pool tables and dart boards. Scrambled Eggs, bacon, and Budweiser were just our closing act as The Boys of the Night Crew, working on “Night Moves” that weren’t exactly what Seger had in mind way back when.