Working at a place can make a person privy to certain things that people on the outside probably don't know. I've had a lot of jobs like that over the years, and have learned a lot about other people and the hidden mechanisms of the businesses I've worked for. I've had quite a few gigs working at various types of grocery stores, and have learned a few things. Things like...
5. Complaining about things being expensive doesn't solve anything.
I hear this gripe from customers fairly often. Meat is getting so expensive. One recent customer of mine complained about the cost of our market-made, labor-intensive chicken salad because it had gone up 20 cents. She squawked about how she would no longer be able to afford it, asked for a discount and then continued to babble about a recent vacation to the Bahamas before leaving the store in her new Mercedes.
Besides the ridiculous nature of this person's argument that she was being priced out of delicious chicken salad, what do these cheapskates expect a store to do? Meat is expensive. It's not cheap to raise large animals simply so they can be killed and eaten. When you get into things like organic meat, the price goes higher and higher. Supply and demand come into play, and people like me have to make a living, too.
My point? Complaining about prices won't affect them at all. The older folks who somehow expect prices to have stayed the same since the 1960s are also hard to reason with.
4. Avoid that olive bar
I used to work in the deli of an expensive specialty grocery store in Houston. There was this huge, self-serve olive bar against a wall, which was full of expensive imported olives of all sorts. So what's wrong with that? Sounds great, huh? Yes, it would be except for the constant stream of children and even some adults who would come through running their hands through the olive trough, helping themselves to a free sample or two, or just thrusting their gross hands into the thing with abandon, for reasons I can't fathom. I used to buy olives from that bar until I witnessed that behavior. Never again. Same thing goes for any salad bar, actually.
