EOCAWKI: Delivering the Goods and Bringing Home the Bacon (Literally!)

I cranked out baloney
for corporations for 40 years.
How different can sausage making be? 

It seems like yesterday that I was bringing my sons to work with me on special days. Today, we swapped roles. I spent the morning tagging along with my oldest son, Chris, who is co-owner of a company that makes artisanal sausage here in Richmond, VA.  Along with getting a first hand understanding of the myriad chores, regulations and responsibilities that come with small business ownership -- and helping to prepare bacon for smoking -- I had the eye-opening opportunity to ride along on a series of deliveries to a few local branches of two large supermarket chains. One chain’s been around for a while; the other is a relative newcomer to this market.

As a shopper, I never thought much about how the products I pick up off the shelves or pluck out of the refrigerated cases got there.  But it turns out that the process of getting food into supermarkets is more complex than I had imagined. There are strict protocols involved in presenting the product at each store. They involve signing in, presenting the list of product, scanning the product in and, some cases, placing the product in the case.  But most interesting to me was the pivotal role played by “The Receiver,” the person who facilitates this process at each store.  The processes might be similar, but human interaction changes everything.  The differences between supermarket chains and among the stores in each chain was striking.

Getting the bacon ready for the smoker.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the new kid in town has a very slick and relatively painless process, made better by the professionalism and cordiality of the receivers. By contrast, the other chain was a bit less buttoned up and some of the receivers we encountered were indifferent at best and in one case, downright hostile. In fact, I told Chris at one point that that particular receiver was the most unpleasant person I had ever encountered in real life. And that’s after 40 years in the corporate world.

To be fair, unpleasant encounters in the corporate world are mostly just uncomfortable. I’ve encountered some passive aggression and even some overt hostility.  But never have I dealt professionally with someone who was as intentionally obstructive and downright nasty as this particular person.  (Let’s call her Roxy.)  I don’t want to be judgmental; I don’t know what’s happening in Roxy’s life to make her as mean as she seems to be.  And it was actually quite funny to watch the vendors waiting with us -- mostly larger older men -- practically quaking at the prospect of unintentionally unleashing this tiny ball of pent up fury.  It turned out this was not difficult to do.  

After we were kept waiting for half an hour outside a sealed door on a hot loading dock, Roxy finally raised the door and asked Chris who he was with. When he told her the name of his company she informed him in a tone I can only describe as scornful, that this wasn’t his scheduled delivery time and he would have to come back. The thing is, Roxy makes the schedule but doesn’t tell the vendors when their scheduled time is so it’s actually impossible to arrive at the assigned time. Chris kept his composure admirably.  He simply said, “Well, we’re here now. How do you want to proceed?” This produced a loud, disdainful sigh. She returned to her desk for about 30 seconds then agreed to admit us but instructed us to stand several feet away from her while she stared into a nearby bin. Finally, after another minute or so, we were cleared for final approach. I had the boxes on a hand truck for Roxy to scan. I moved them toward her desk but she instructed me to move then “into the light.”  Well, since the whole place was rather dimly lit, I had some difficulty following this guidance and she made her annoyance clear to me. But we cleared that hurdle, arranged the sausage in its case and cleared out. On the way out, Roxy was tormenting her next victim and we scooted by the growing line of waiting vendors who reminded me of nothing so much as the people lined up to get soup from the Soup Nazi in Seinfeld.

It turns out that while Roxy is an extreme case, (as Chris observed, terrifying in the moment but hysterically funny in retrospect), what you see “backstage” in a supermarket might be reflective of the customer experience out front.  Perhaps it’s true that a company culture that is genuine and deeply rooted is reflected not only by those who serve the customer directly but also by those who work behind that door that’s labeled “Employees Only.”  Today’s encounter with Roxy actually has me rethinking where I’ll do my supermarket shopping. And with Lidl, Aldi and Publix joining the already competitive Richmond supermaket scrum, I'm spoiled for choice.