Chapter Nine

The process of getting to know each of the department managers was a painful one. I had already gotten to know Benny Duncan and had a few notes for him that primarily regarded presentation and the way his staff interacted with the customers as well as their fellow coworkers.

There was one person in particular employed by maintenance that enjoyed being abrasive toward the cashiers at the front end. He looked and dressed like Benny, but his demeanor was far less relaxed.

Whenever he emptied the individual trash cans of the cashiers, he would scan the contents far too thoroughly. When he found an item that he considered recyclable, he would dump the entire trash on the conveyor belt and berate the cashier for throwing a recyclable item in the trash.

He was the first employee on my list to let go. From what I could see, it was going to be quite the long list. The first part of my plan was to trim the fat at the lowest level and give the best of the surviving employees full time positions. The ones who were competent and punctual deserved higher salaries in any case. This would have to make a skeleton crew work until we were able to improve the starting rate and benefits for employees and seek out more qualified candidates.

This, however, would prove to be difficult as the managers slowly revealed themselves to be unfit for even a starting position at any ideal business.

Jaime was the manager of the front end. She was the epitome of being hired for age rather than her qualifications, her abilities or plain common sense on the part of those that hired her.

She was on the latter end of middle age and it showed. One would think that this would enable one to gain some wisdom or at least a sense of personal presence after years of being in the world. Sadly, this was the Fresh Face Co-Op, where everything defied whatever a reasonable person would think.

Jaime’s tactless manner with the customers and her staff paired with her infrequent trips down to the sales floor when she actually managed to show up to work made her a less-than-ideal candidate for a front-end manager. From the way Sara told things, Jaime had actually managed to show up to work quite a bit and even work overtime when she was on an hourly salary. However, ever since she had been promoted to the manager of her department, her annual salary had made it so that she would get paid the same amount regardless of how much time she spent there. That being the case, Jaime spent as little time at work as possible.

This actually appeared to be a good thing as she was clearly a toxic presence when she was there.

“Gerald is dead!” she proclaimed bluntly at a customer. “You cannot use his owner’s number.”

“Who is the customer?” I asked the nearest employee, a stock boy who labored intensely over boxes of macaroni and cheese made with all organic ingredients.

“That’s Gerald’s widow,” said the stock boy. “After an owner dies, the immediate family members can no longer take advantage of the ownership.”

My eyes bugged out and I jumped into action. I took the now sobbing widow to Sara at customer service and told her to fill out the paperwork so that her late husband’s ownership could be transferred over to her. I then apologized to her and gave her a gift certificate for the trouble. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the only time that I had to jump in on things when it came to Jaime. Yelling at grieving widows was the least of her antics.

She required all the front-end employees to add together the totals on the saved receipts of every single card transaction separated into credit, debit and federal assistance.

“Why do you require your employees to do this?” I asked. “The machines keep track of all of this anyway and none of the other front-end managers require this of their employees in the other locations. You’re the only one.”

“I like to go one step further,” said Jaime.

She then tapped her forehead with her thick, sausage-like finger as if she had just showed me an example of her superior intellect.

“A step further for what?” I asked. “You’re just forcing them to stay longer so that they can add together the totals of hundreds and hundreds of flimsy pieces of paper. You’re bound to have a few fly away; the totals at the end of the night are hardly ever accurate. This is all not to mention the fact that you’re costing the company extra money for the additional time the employees have to stay after their shifts for what appears to be completely no reason.” Jaime said nothing, she merely tapped her forehead with her finger again smiled slyly as if she had any form of guile. I think she might have thought she was being seductive to me, which was… no. Just no.

I would have found everything she did completely baffling had I not become accustomed to the bizarre methodology of the operations in this strange land.

This is all not to mention Jaime’s daily work attire. It was entirely inappropriate on a consistent basis. We’re talking about grungy sweat pants that clung so tightly to her massive, tapioca pudding consistency thighs or, on the days when she was feeling more like a sexy secretary (barf), pencil skirts with slits so high that every time she walked, everyone got a view of the aforementioned thighs without the benefit of even a thin piece of jersey cloth to cover them.

Upon seeing this monstrosity of unprofessionalism for the first time, I thought, perhaps, it might be for the best that she spent the majority of the time she was there up in the office where the cashiers counted the cash in the drawers of their registers at the beginning and end of every day and added the receipts they had managed to keep from their shifts. My suspicion that it was better to not have Jaime anywhere near the customers was sealed once and for all when I got within the vicinity of her and could smell that she consistently had a fragrance that was not unlike a refrigerator full of leftovers that had not been cleaned out for several months.

I desperately wanted to discuss all of this with Cassie Bobeck. Alas, the general manager had extended her vacation. Although she attempted to put in under her paid sick leave, I quashed that with Fresh Face’s administrator, Debbie.

“Ms. Bobeck won’t like this very much when she gets back,” said Debbie.

“No,” I said. “She won’t. You just send her to me, though, and I’ll explain it all to her slowly and calmly. The owners all had a collective vote on what was to be done about the abysmal profits of this place and they voted on hiring someone like me. Democracy rules.”

Debbie gave me a cat butt face. I suspected she had her own less-than-stellar work habits that I was soon to catch on to. I had become accustomed to obdurate clients in the past, but usually there was a single owner or person running the show who I would be able to appeal to with the bottom line. In the case of the Fresh Face Co-Op, there were several “owners” who had purchased a share in the cooperative. It was impossible to appeal to them and instead I had several disorderly employees and managers who had a vested interest in keeping things exactly as they were. If my plans were implemented, gone were the days where they could get away with doing whatever they wanted.

Yes. Quite a few low-level employees stood to benefit from the changes I intended to make, but several others did not. In fact, a large portion of them would be fired unless they adapted to the new rules which was not something many of them ever intended to do. From Rhonda’s never-ending penchant for shopping while she was supposed to be at her register to Derek’s habit of spraying down the conveyor belt with bleach letting it run (the bleach was only supposed to be used if a biohazard was spilled) for as long as he could get away with so that customers would not go to his register, some of the low level employees simply wanted a paycheck for minimal effort. It didn’t matter that the paycheck was pitiful. At least it was a paycheck; that was more than anywhere else in the city was willing to give them. The Fresh Face Co-Op was where people went when nobody would hire them.

As far as managers went, the deli proved to be the most volatile location. I even went so far as to mark it as a “red zone” in my plans. This is coding that I very rarely incorporate, but it seemed appropriate in this case. Marking a single aspect of a business like this in my profession means that said aspect is such a weak link, it could bring down the entire business in one fell swoop. I could very easily see the deli in the flagship location doing this to not only its location, but also to all the sister locations. It was simply that bad.

There was quite the backstory to this one, apparently. A month previous to my arrival, the manager who had been in charge of the deli at the time had only given two weeks’ notice for leaving. Although this was the bare minimum notification one gives for leaving, it was usually more than most employees give, however it seemed abrupt given the dedication of the manager.

“Kara couldn’t handle the pressure of working in the deli,” Debbie in administration explained to me when I asked about it. “Running such a pivotal part of our family is a high-pressure responsibility and she couldn’t handle it.”

When Debbie fed me this line, it was so smooth and rehearsed, she must have been well practiced in explaining it to outsiders. Needless to say, I was more than somewhat suspicious of this assessment. This was due to the fact that the employee they had chosen to replace her was a seventeen-year-old with two misdemeanors on his record for petty theft.

Both of the businesses he had purportedly stolen from were direct neighbors of the Fresh Face Co-Op: a technology store specializing in cellphones and cellphone repair and an auto body shop. Each one of them flanked his place of work. Each one of them banned him from entering the premises ever again as he had been convicted of stealing from both.

It appeared that he had entered each business during his break from managing the deli on separate occasions and used the time to do some “extracurricular activities”. In the end, he did jail time and community service, but the Fresh Face Co-Op hired him back both times because nobody had been hired to replace him each time he did it. Needless to say, he did not strike me as an exceptionally bright or motivated young man in a way that made him uniquely qualified to run “such a pivotal part of our family.” I decided to ask the only employee in the store capable of being straightforward with me, while still having the awareness and ability to truly determine what was going on.

“The fryer had been overfilled with grease,” Sara told me. “So, when some tofu steaks were dropped in, Kara was the one who got most of it on her. It was soaked into her pants… I mean, it was in there. Right? She dropped to the ground right then and there and her pants had to be peeled off right in the deli in front of everyone. By the time they had managed to get them off, the damage was extensive. She had third degree burns up, down and all the way around her thighs. I talked to her just last week. She had to go up a pant size and it wasn’t because she gained weight. It was from all the scar tissue.”

I stopped her right there.

“Okay,” I said. “I get the picture. I know why she left.”

I didn’t want to hear any more gruesome details. It was an hour before Fresh Face closed and Sara’s shift had just ended. I stood with her at the bus stop under the pretext that I wanted to make sure she was safe waiting for her bus ride home. Although safety is important to me, this was an ideal time for me to get information from the most sensible employee I had gotten to know so far.

Sara pulled a bottle of water out of her backpack and unscrewed the cap.

“That’s not the reason why she left, though,” she said.

“Come again?” I asked.

Sara took a quick swig of water before answering me.

“I mean, the excruciating pain and long, discouraging recovery were probably definitely a part of it,” she conceded. “That would have been it for me. No questions asked. But Kara was talking about coming back until the aftermath.”

“There’s more?” I asked.

I felt stupid for even asking the question. Of course there was more! There was always more with that place! Some aspect of our business was mismanaged? Let’s cover it up by mismanaging the fallout even worse!

“There’s more,” she confirmed.

“Which was?”

“The aftermath was really the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

I sighed.

“What happened next?” I asked.

“You know the insurance the co-op is supposed to keep for employees injured on the work sight?” she asked.

My stomach dropped. I prayed this wasn’t going where I thought it was going. Turns out, it was worse: much, much worse. Sara must have seen the look on my face because it was as if she could read my thoughts with her response.

“Yeah,” she said. “Turns out that the insurance had expired, like, weeks before the accident took place and nobody had bothered to renew it because everybody thought that it was somebody’s else’s responsibility to do that.”

My heart began to pound as if I had miraculously consumed a million cups of coffee within a fraction of a second.

No! No! No! No! I thought. This can’t be happening! These can’t the types of people I’m working for now. They’re complete idiots, but they shouldn’t be morally bankrupt. After all, they’re always advertising their products and business as humane and morally superior.

How I laugh at my naïve way of thinking when looking back on things!

“So, do they take accountability for their own screw up and cover the cost out of their own pockets?” Sara asked rhetorically.

“Of course not,” I said in a defeated dejected manner.

“Of course not!” Sara exclaimed, overlapping my answer. “They had a vested interest in making Kara’s incident look like one that she was liable for. They really gave her the run around for weeks and, trust me, she started to get really scared there because it looked like she would have no choice but to return to work at the place that had burned off the flesh on her legs just to pay off the hospital bills.”

“But that shouldn’t happen at all,” I objected. “Not the way the company is structured…”

Among the files Shelby had initially given me was the union handbook. Whenever someone had an injury, a human resources complaint or anything to do with how the employees were treated, they were supposed to speak with a union representative. After all, that’s what their paychecks were getting garnished for. Every single location was supposed to have a union representative advocating for them.

“What did the union representative say about it?” I asked. “Wasn’t she in contact with them?”

“About that…” said Sara.

She cast her eyes downward so that they were heavily shadowed. Her bronze hair glinted in the luminous aura of the streetlight. She really could have been a pretty girl if she weren’t bogged down by the reality of the place that employed her.

“So, it turns out that this location was holding off on elections for the union representative,” she said.

“But the elections are supposed to be held and conducted before the current representative steps down,” I said. “Not after.”

“I know,” said Sara. “It’s just that the previous union representative had left so suddenly. People who work here have the tendency to quit by just not showing up.”

I believed it. It had happened with two employees in the short time that I had been there.

“So anyway,” Sara continued to explain. “Turns out they were holding off on elections and in the meantime, Cassie was filling in on the role.”

The hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. It couldn’t be! That was a massive conflict of interest! In fact, that negated the whole reason for even having a union representative.

“Cassie Bobeck?” I asked, just to be clear.

“Yup,” said Sara.

“Cassie Bobeck as in the general manager of this entire location?” I asked to be one hundred percent, completely, utterly and beyond a shadow of a doubt, clear.

“Yup,” said Sara.

I couldn’t determine if I needed to stand up, sit down, run away or do a million pushups. That was how disorienting the world was in that very moment. Either all the blood in my body was rushing to my head or all the blood in my head was rushing to my body, but I felt a sense of dizziness that I had only felt once before in my life. It was when I had been on a malfunctioning elevator that dropped thirty floors before righting itself. The elevator incident had been scary, but the Fresh Face Co-Op was turning out to be scarier. The elevator had been a mere malfunction of mechanics; the Fresh Face Co-Op was turning out to be a complete malfunction of ethics.

To right myself, I leaned against the pole on which the sign for the bus stop was placed. Nicholas Green truly chose the right assignment for me if he had it in for me.

“And before you get mad at me for just telling you the facts, let me tell you that I know how wrong this all was,” Sara warned me. “I knew this was wrong on every single level. I even collected all the pertinent information to anonymously send to all the local publications on Kara’s behalf.”

“You realize that it’s unwise to tell somebody like me this?” I asked. “For all you know, I could be just as unethical as everybody here. I’m supposed to improve business at this place. Whistleblowers are bad for business. By telling that, you are a whistleblower, you are basically inviting me to fire you.”

Sara took a nonchalant drink of water.

“I know,” she said. “But you won’t.”

“But I could,” I retorted back at Sara.

“But you won’t,” Sara repeated back at me.

“How do you know?” I asked her.

She sighed.

“Because you’re not completely devoid of all hope for the whole of humanity,” she said. “At least not yet. You just want to be.”

Those words punched me square in the gut. It was clear that there was more to this girl than I had initially given her credit for.

In a strange way, she reminded me of my old friend Elijah even way before we had that talk at the casino, though there was some aspect of her that reminded me of Elijah at the casino as well. There was a sense of relief that somebody else was finally seeing all of what was wrong with her place of work.

Still, there was a piece of her that was like him from so long before that. It was before he was soured by all the things he had seen in the world. It was clear that they both had the same keen sense of observation paired with the ability to interpret the things they had seen and so eloquently and succinctly put it all into words.

I feared for her. As Elijah’s way of seeing the world had embittered him into an irreparable state of anger and misanthropy and, to a lesser extent, had affected the way I saw things and done the same to myself, this girl was headed down the same path.

“It’s not like I’m planning on sticking around here forever anyway,” she said defiantly.

I couldn’t blame her for that at all.

“Oh really?” I asked anyway, to test the waters. “What’s the game plan for after you leave then?” Sara shrugged.

“I mean, I’d rather you didn’t fire me if that’s what we’re still talking about here,” she said. “I’d like to pay off a few student loans and save up some money before I take off, if you know what I’m saying.”

“Where to?” I asked. “I mean, where do you intend to go after you leave this place?”

Sara seemed hesitant to say.

“Chicago probably, if we’re being honest,” she said. “But if we’re being real here, I know it’s been my home for my entire life and everything, but I’m not crazy about the Midwest.”

“Me neither,” I confessed to her.

“Well,” she said. “At least it’s temporary for you.”

I frowned. With each passing day at the Fresh Face Co-Op, there was a horrific new revelation. With each horrific new revelation, the less and less temporary my job there seemed.

“What did you go to school for?” I asked her. “If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I don’t mind at all,” said Sara. “I went to school for journalism.”

The parallels to Elijah just kept coming. She even majored in the discipline that he had seemed to be more skilled in!

“Why aren’t you working as a journalist, then?” I asked.

Sara scoffed.

“With the papers around here?” she asked me, one eyebrow cocked in sardonic quandary. “Have you ever even read the papers around here?”

I shrugged.

“No,” I confessed. “I have an online subscription to the paper back home. I read that.”

“Journalism is dying, anyway,” Sara justified. “It’s all online nowadays, so it doesn’t matter if it’s accurate, anymore. No offense to your paper…”

“None taken,” I assured her.

She was even reminding me of Elijah in her reasoning for not pursuing journalism. I was beginning to wonder if she was his long lost little sister or something.

“All that matters now is that the headline is compelling enough or incendiary enough to click on,” Sara continued. “Half the reputable ‘news’ sources don’t even cite anything or, if they do, it turns out they’re just citing themselves! I’ve clicked on links to citations before! They just lead back to their own articles which do the same thing! It’s all just circular!”

I made a mental note to try finding the citation sources in my paper when I got home.

Sara’s little pink lips pucker as if she had just bitten down on a lemon. The thoughts she had been having must have been quite sour to her. The more she spoke, the more she looked like my old friend from college in a bad way. Even though she hadn’t fully transformed, the process of embitterment had already taken seed. I hoped she would be able to make it out of this city and state… Heck! I hoped she would be able to make it out of the entire Midwest in time, before it completely took over. It was her only chance to stop the process.

“So,” I decided to pick up where we had left off. “What happened? With Kara, I mean? Did her hospital bills end up getting covered?”

“Just barely,” said Sara. “But not without a fight.”

I released a sigh of relief. If they hadn’t been covered, I would have had to take the funds out of the budget to see to it. It wasn’t just my sense of morality, either. It would look very, very, bad for my record if the first thing that happened when I got there was a major lawsuit, as selfish of me as that sounds.

“At least there’s that,” I said.

“Yeah,” said Sara. “At least there’s that.”

I was rooting for Sara. I really was. However, I hoped that I ended my time at the Fresh Face Co-Op before she did, because she was the only one I could count on while I was there.

Sara’s bus came, and I bade her goodbye before returning back to the grocery store where I saw Dora attempting and failing to make a perfect pyramid of ethically sourced blood diamond oranges.

The manager of the produce department was tied with Benny Duncan as the least dubious character of all the department managers. In fact, I’m fairly certain she was more sincere and trustworthy than Benny was. Unfortunately, she wasn’t exceptionally bright. Though there was a brightness in her eyes, I had to chastise myself whenever I privately referred to her as “dull Dora” within the privacy of my mind. The poor child didn’t deserve any cruelty directed toward her whether it was spoken aloud or not.

Dora swanned around the produce department in floor-length hippie chick skirts, taking in the world around her with her big, dumb, brown, cow eyes. She seemed sincere about her desire to help in any given situation. This would have been great, except realizations about what words or situations meant generally came too slow for her. By the time she was able to interpret any meaning behind what she was seeing or being told, too much time had passed for her to be very much help.

This was annoying but having experienced her coworkers long before I became accustomed with her personality, I became infinitely more patient with her shortcomings than I might have been otherwise. Thus, I couldn’t bear to hold all that much against her. As such, I resolved not to tax her with too many changes to her department as to do so would likely result in her breaking down in tears.

She had a tendency to do that when she was overwhelmed with too much new information.

Let her swim in her sea of ignorance; it’s peaceful there, I thought to myself. The produce department isn’t doing all that poorly. Well… it’s would be doing better if the pricing changed, but that isn’t really her fault. In any case, it wouldn’t help to do anything quite yet. I’ll deal with everyone else first.

To be honest, I was certain produce was the most legitimate source of profit keeping the Fresh Face Co-Op afloat, anyway. Sure, a single head of lettuce cost more than what most of the employees made in an hour, but some of the more exotic products were ones that could not be purchased anywhere within the city limits. I checked all the competitors and verified this as fact early on in my tenure there.

Finally, there was Charles, the manager of the dry goods department. Charles was… Charles. In his youth, he was probably very promising. He was intelligent enough, that was for sure and I had to admit, he probably was a very good employee when I wasn’t around. However, something about my presence made him so… defiant.

“Are you here to tell me how to handle a mop?” he asked me once when I just happened to be passing by. “Is what I’m doing here not good enough for you?”

A jar of all-natural pesto sauce made from locally sourced basil and pine nuts had been dropped to the aisle floor. The shards of glass glistened and glittered in the slick green substance.

“Not at all,” I said. “You are doing fine. I’m just passing through. Although, I don’t know why no one from Benny’s team isn’t taking care of this.”

“Because I am!” Charles snapped at me. “All right?”

I raised my hands in the air to indicate that no offense was meant.

“All right,” I said. “Carry on.”

Wait a minute, I thought as I walked away. Charles is technically my subordinate. Why did I let him get away with speaking to me like that?

The even bigger question was, why did he even think it was okay to speak to me this way? Clearly, the rules were different at the Fresh Face Co-Op than they were anywhere I had ever been stationed.

This is going to be a challenge to navigate, I thought to myself. There’s no question about that.