Doing Closing

3rd week at Safeway now, and I'm doing closing :-) Most people hate closing, because it means a lot of extra work and stress, and you're responsible for the completion of a lot more tasks. If someone else screws up, it just means more work for the people who do closing-- if the people closing screw up-- they get in trouble with management, who will see all your mistakes and things you neglected to do, when they do morning inspections. So basically, if you don't do closing perfectly, your boss(es) will definitely know, and you'll get called into the office if you slack off too much.

But for me, who is a perfectionist to begin with, I see this as an opportunity to demonstrate my strong work-ethic, and to get more much-needed experience doing go-backs. Perhaps after a couple of weeks doing closing, I will have nearly the entire store down-- that would be good.

The biggest problem I had with doing closing today (other than the go-backs-- which sadly I am still having way too much trouble with, although I'm fast improving!) was with sweeps, which I had to do twice as fast (the whole store in 15 minutes) in order to have time for all the other closing duties stacked onto the regular stuff. I had to work really fast, and tried my best (but somewhat failing) not to cut corners to get everything done. All the other courtesy clerks cut corners, but not me. I need to stay ahead of the pack if I want to be successful here.

Closing duties consist of turning off the power to the secondary entrance (to optimize traffic) at 9pm, taking out all the trash and recycle, both in and out of the store, replace all the garbage bags, refill all the plastic bags for the checkstands, pick up all the trash around the checkstands, wipe down the barcode scanners and food belts with windex, put away all the carts, and....of course go-backs. There are also other closing duties that need to be done from time to time, but these are the ones you do every day (if you're closing).

First day of closing, I did everything right, except I didn't know I was supposed to refill the checker's bags, and I still had a lot of go-backs leftover when I had to check out. I'll do better with closing tomorrow, hopefully.

Going To Make A Map!

It's the last day of work this week, and I've got the whole system down-- well, almost the whole system-- the hardest part of the job is still go-backs, naturally. And helping customers is just as hard for the same reason: I still don't know where so many things are! To make matters worse, most of the customers here are fairly intelligent and knowledgeable of Safeway stores, so they almost always ask about the stuff that can't be answered by common sense or even a basic knowledge of the store-- the stuff that really is hard to find, like tofu, wheat germ, and mint leaves.

From the very beginning, I had been planning on creating a blueprint of the entire store, so that I could memorize everything about the store in a week or two, and be done with it. Yesterday I spent hours painstakingly surveying the entire store, literally down the the millimeter (scaled to the millimeter, mind you!) I used my footsteps to measure the store (an ancient, but very effective measurement scheme known as "paces"), and scaled each footstep down to a millimeter using a ruler. I then charted out a map of the main store area using North, South, East, West, NE, NW, SE, and SW measurements. I didn't have a geometry compass, so I manually traced right-angles to compensate. It's a very accurate map, and all things considered, a damn good one!

The whole map, when it's done, will be color and number-coded, the isles labels (i.e. isle 1A and 1B), and have a Legend at the bottom to interpret the whole thing. It's going to be a massive project, and will include the parking lot, the back areas (break room, various freezers/storage/loading areas, etc.), and will tell me absolutely everything there is to know about the store, down to the exact shelf location of every size of every brand of every type of food, product, etc.

The map will also tell me the locations of everything in the produce department, coded by PLU#; this will help me to learn the PLUs for every produce item, which I will need to know to become a food clerk or manager.

I'm completely in the rhythm of things now, and everyone, from management to my peers, really likes me. Hopefully I can maintain the full support and favor of everyone here, so I can quickly move up in the company-- I'm really looking forward to that!

Now that I've completed a draft of the map of Safeway, I'm going to (once I get a scanner, or ask my dad to use his!) scan it to jpg., and once I complete the whole thing, bundle the whole set of images as a pdf for you for your viewing pleasure here.