Soon after graduating high school I obtained my first job. Not really a first, as before that I would babysit the neighbor’s granddaughter, on weekends and in the summer. However, my first real job as a cashier of a Five & Dime. I was excited, but a bit apprehensive too, because I didn’t know how to count back change and I was afraid of making a mistake and embarrassing myself.
Talking with my mom about it, she quickly knew the solution. She took me into the den. She sat in the chair and I on the floor in front of her and she emptied money from her wallet onto the floor in front of me. She said, it’s real easy. All you have to do is count up, from a penny; let’s start with a quarter. Choose the coins in front of you; start with the penny and add the coins until you reach .25 cents. I did that. Then she said, lets try a dollar. That was easy enough and from there we went over several different denominations of monies, until counting up, became second nature to me. After my lesson though, she told me to stop being so afraid of making a mistake. “Everyone makes mistakes”, she said.
The cash register then was not like the ones people use today. It was a rather large machine, with the number buttons on the front for adding and a leaver on the side of the machine to pull down to bring up the total amount of the sale. Then of course the credit card machine. The card was placed in the card slot, carbon paper placed on top and a roll bar that you would slide over the paper and card to apply the ink off of the carbon. The carbon copy of the sale was given to the customer and the top copy, placed in the register drawer as a record of the sale.
There were other responsibilities assigned to me, which included the stocking of the shelves with the items that were checked in and received from the vendor companies.
The vendor’s truck drivers were not allowed passed the storage room doors onto the sales floor. The trucker drivers would pull up to the bay doors of the stock room and they would be greeted by the manager, who would check in their haul and then send them on their way. The manager and the stock assistant would stage the items in their designated area in the store room and then bring out, the items that were to be put on the shelves, and put those boxes on the isles. It was then the job of the store clerk to put the items that were in the boxes onto the shelves.
Where as technology changed the cash register machine to automatic rather than manual, the consumer changed the process of truck driver check-ins and created an additional employment opportunity. I don’t know how I know this, but I do and I told the story to my oldest son a few years ago and his response was, that’s the story to blog about.
Here’s hoping I can do it justice, on more time.
It began with the ‘guaranty seal of freshness’ that was/is placed on food packaged items, ‘or your money back’. Then of course expired items would find their way onto the shelves of the sales floor and were sold. Consumers began calling into the companies for their refund of the purchased expired items. It began happening often enough that the vendor companies went to the retail companies with an offer to help provide a solution.
They would train their own people to stock the shelves and the retailers could reduce their hiring of stock clerks. It was a money saving deal, that changed the relationship between the vendor’s truck driver and the retailer.
The driver of the delivery truck, became an account manager and was then allowed onto the sales floor. They were not only checked-in, but they also stock the shelves with the merchandise, rotating the stock and create product orders to ensure the shelves are fully stocked for the retailer.
The vendor companies also noticed that there were back stock left in the stock rooms of stores from the early morning deliveries, merchandise that was overstock and didn’t make it to the sales floor. And of course merchandise can’t be sold from the stock room. The vendor companies went back to the retailers and in so doing, created an additional opportunity for a person to go to the designated stores, in the afternoons and restock the shelves from the back stock, for evening sales.
I had that job a little over a decade ago, part-time merchandiser, which made me think back to my first job in the late 70s, and how it all came to be, that the consumer created the opportunity and changed the relationship between the vendor’s truck driver and the retailer. Even though a precarious relationship, it has survived almost 50 years.