This One’s For The Clerks

You know, I just hate it when folks downplay the need for living wages by referring to working people as unskilled. What does that even mean? I assume anyone who uses that term has never run a pallet jack over their toe or nicked their thumb on a box-knife during an overnight shift, let alone rang up dozens of customers with a perfectly accurate till at shift’s end. 

Since much of my adult and professional life has been in retail, I’d like to focus on some of the skills and talents that many of my wonderful colleagues have demonstrated to pay the bills and ensure that everyone is fed. They are now performing these difficult jobs in the shadow of a pandemic, where the work is the bridge between hunger and a stocked pantry, anxiety and peace of mind, and everyone’s wellbeing. 

I don’t recall a time or place when my retail or service colleagues did not possess a range of marketable and necessary skills to get through the working day and meet the needs of the customers. This goes for both the spreadsheet jockeys who could run a V-lookup or build a pivot table in a drunken stupor, to the highly caffeinated clerks on early morning shifts who could break down, pack out and clean up a 2000 case load by 9 A.M. 

My favorite job as a stock clerk was when my stores would have rear-load dairy coolers, where you were able stock the shelves from the back, and were not on the service floor. I’d get to my shift at 3 or 4 A.M., break down the loaded pallets into individual cases, typically 50-75 cases of mixed product, usually milk, butter, eggs, juices, yogurts, etc. Usually each pallet was wrapped in several layers of heavy duty shrink wrap, which had to be cut off, rolled up and discarded out of the way. I’d stage and rotate by shelf date each of the cases over to their section and stock 75-100 cases an hour for several hours until the load was packed out. 

This stock clerk gig, which I did on and off for years among other roles at retail, exemplifies a number of the skills that retail workers have to perform and master every day:

•       Physical stamina: you burn a lot of calories moving boxes, and you have to pace yourself pretty aggressively to get a load broken down, stocked and fronted. On the low end you are picking up, moving and unloading 200-300 cases per shift, but if you end up in a busy store during a holiday timeframe, you could easily be doing 500-600 cases a shift.

•       Ergonomic skills: You are constantly moving, lifting, turning, bending over and stretching during the shift. Unless you want a brief career where you pop a tendon or twist an ankle, you have to be conscious of how you move and how to maximize the efficiency and speed of your movements while minimizing efforts and exertion.

•       Box-knife skills: I am old school and prefer regular old boxcutters or carpet-knives, but many chains now require the use of big and clunky safety cutters, which have a plastic handle and metal shield over the cutting blade. You are cutting open hundreds of boxes per shift, so knowing how deep to cut, cutting straight and true, and always cutting away from your body are very helpful skills in being safe and efficient. 

•       Customer skills: in the midst of all this physical exertion, you’d have to frequently pause and listen to a customer’s concerns or questions, help them out, and then get back in the groove. It wasn’t just multitasking, but the ability to downshift and upshift your energy from body to brain and back in order to be helpful, intelligent and sociable to the folks whose money was paying your wages.

•       Hand/eye coordination: when you work with your hands for a while, you develop a lot more dexterity and better reflexes. By handling thousands of cups of yogurt or cartons of eggs for months on end, I’d get faster at stocking and stacking them, neater and tighter. Like a circus juggler, I’d rarely ever drop anything, and I always caught a plummeting bottle or box on its way down. 

•       Communication, both written and verbal: a lot of information needs to be shared between shifts, staff and management. It’s important to be articulate and know what to relay so that the department is run efficiently and any issues with deliveries, short coded product, quality concerns, temperature, special customer orders, etc., are all communicated. 

•       Basic Math: If you are a replenishment buyer in addition to being a stock clerk, you are also responsible for doing the orders to make sure product is incoming on a regular basis. Depending on the department, you have to familiarize yourself with hundreds or even thousands of individual sku’s. And depending on how effective the retailer’s enterprise software is, your replenishment orders can range from being highly manual, with no sales data or backstock info, to being highly automated and algorithmic, where your job is to mainly manage out of stocks in a perpetual inventory system. I worked in a system where you ended up doing a lot of simple math in your head, estimating how much product needed to be reordered based on how much sold through, how much was still in backstock and how much could fit on the shelf depending on how many facings each sku, and all the while keeping in mind the day of the week, time of the year and whether or not each item is on a markdown that would create some elasticity in demand… for hundreds of items, every workday. 

•       Moderately Heavy equipment skills: Pallets are 40”x48” and weigh hundreds of pounds when fully loaded. Once they are being moved on a pallet jack, they have a lot of momentum and can very easily injury someone, including yourself. A forklift is likewise serious business and you need to get trained and certified by a specialist to drive one of those things as they weigh thousands of pounds and need to be properly balanced when turning or moving with loads. And likewise, cardboard bailers require your full attention, as the hydraulic press can easily kill someone if not used properly.

So, these are some of the skills needed in just one type of job in a retail setting. Any given grocery store will have hundreds of employees, each doing these jobs and many more to keep shelves stocked, products fresh and customers happy. And keep in mind, all this was before the pandemic, and the challenges for retail workers that the crisis has created. 

Hundreds of retail and supply chain workers across the country have died. Thousands more have had their lives, incomes and careers disrupted once they got sick with the virus, which has left many workers and their family members with chronic and ongoing health problems. These folks deserve a living wage, protection to unionize and collectively bargain, health care benefits, hazard pay, paid sick leave, and access to PPE. They deserve customer mask mandates in stores and staffed up shifts so there is ample support to keep stores cleaned and sanitized to prevent the spread of the virus. The clerks and their skills have kept us all fed, now let’s make sure they are taken care of.      

Originally posted here.