The Kwiksave Chronicles of Slobberchops - Part Two

This is a candid recollection of my memories working at Kwiksave (the now defunct discount supermarket chain) as a ‘Stock Lad’.

I wasted over FOUR years of my life in this horrible dump, and still wake up with nightmare's occasionally thinking I'm still there.

Some of the names have been slightly changed simply to save my arse in case anyone takes offence at some of the details regarding my facts or opinions. Many of the people mentioned are now dead as this happened so long ago, but their siblings are not.

This will be a multi-part article as there is simply too much to tell in one sitting. I hope you find it as entertaining as I found recalling it from my brain.

Other articles in the series:
The Kwiksave Chronicles of Slobberchops - Part One

Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KwikSave,Church_Lane-geograph.org.uk-_350688.jpg

‘Some kids are best left to fend for themselves, and others were born to stack shelves’ – Steven Wilson

Life at Kwiksave was hard; there’s no getting round that, and @slobberchops was born to stack shelves at least for the next few years.

A stock lad was expected to fill the shelves, take away the cardboard, clean the back shop, accept deliveries, clean the public toilets and clean that horrible asphalt black floor after the customers have all left amongst other things.

My salary for all this was around £40 a week before tax.

Source: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/539689

The toilets were not much better than those in the image shown.

I had 30 minutes for lunch, a 10 minute break around 10.30am and another one at 3.30pm. Kwiksave did not trust their staff and we were expected to ‘clock in’ and ‘clock out’ even for the short breaks.

I was also expected to ‘brew up’ for Mort every morning. The one perk I got was free cups of Tea or Nescafe Coffee. I still don’t like vanilla Nescafe today.

Source: http://pngimg.com/download/17080/?i=1

Mort accused me often of trying to poison him with extra strong coffee.., yes I did put a rather generous lump of coffee in his cup every day.

I was on my feet all day, including EVERY Saturday. I didn’t work Tuesday afternoon’s and Sundays.

During my first 3 months, Carrot the assistant manager left to become manager of the Bury store. I was then left to do all the work with Mort or more specifically, I did all the work.

Simply put, Mort was a lazy bastard; he didn’t like to do work. If he filled up the yoghurt section, or walked around looking important with a pad doing stocktaking then he considered himself busy.

That uppity look was something I had to ignore, him looking down the end of his nose at most everybody as they were in his mind... inferior beings.

I was equipped with a used overall. This piece of well used clothing went over my head and had three holes. One for my head and two for my arms. It was brown in colour and sported the words ‘Kwiksave’ on the chest right of centre. It was also a cast off from whoever had left before I started, lovely!

I also was given a ‘stock knife’. Let me explain... at Kwiksave goods are accepted in boxes. For example a box of Heinz beans would contain 12 tins of Heinz beans in a cardboard box.

Unlike other stores, Kwiksave used to cut off the end of the box exposing the 12 tins of beans to the customer. So the shelves were full of boxes of all products with the ends cut off. Why they did this, I will never know.

To do this, I used ‘The stock knife’, a variant of the Stanley knife with a very sharp blade.

Source: https://pixabay.com/en/carpet-knife-knife-stanley-sharp-296367/

At the end of every day, the shelves were littered with half empty boxes of every kind of foodstuff you can imagine, and every day close to finishing I kicked a large box around and had to ‘rack down’.

This terminology was effectively filling the more full boxes and emptying the empty boxes, ripping them up and compressing them into the large empty box that I kicked around the floor, eventually empying it into a huge skip.

If the blade in the stock knife became blunt, you turned it over as it has two edges. If both edges became blunt, you walked to the office, knocked and asked for a new blade.

After inspection of the old one, a new one was issued, usually by Mort as 95% of his working career he sat on his arse in said office doing virtually nothing.

Besides the male employees of Kwiksave, myself and Mort, there were also some female employees. These were the checkout operators. There were no self-service operations in 1980, everything came via the cashiers.

The supervisor, Sharon Hartley was a good looking young woman with a rather extravert personality. I think she rather liked me as she sometimes pulled on my curls (I had longish hair then) and called me ‘cute’.

Unfortunately one of her front incisors was broken off and had become rotten which left people rather shocked when she smiled. I believe she was terrified of the dentist.

Marianne was a regular checkout operator, probably in her early 30’s, with curly blond bleached hair and was also good looking. A very down to earth, no nonsense person I didn’t have much interaction with her.

Linda was a chubby girl, married in her late 20’s. She was a cheery person, but not very bright.

There was another full-time checkout girl, but she was not talkative, or at least not to me, I can’t even remember her name. She seemed unfriendly and gave off that vibe.

The checkout girls were expected to memorise every price in the store. There were no price stamps on any of the stock.

Source: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/288342

Each girl was tested every week by the supervisor Sharon to see if they remembered the prices using a shopping basket full of random items. This included things that had increased in price too.

Failure to remember the prices correctly resulted in disciplinary measures. It wasn’t that easy for them too.

To be continued...

All stock photographs I have used are filtered as ‘Labelled for reuse’ or 'Labelled for noncommercial reuse' and the sources have been cited.