A Kmart Night

I have often reminisced about my time at Kmart. I like to wax nostalgic over that time in my life when I worked there. I reminisce about those years and yearn for them simply because they represented a period in my life when I had no responsibility and my main concern was which party am I going to hit that weekend. Anyway, here as best as I can, I will try to re-create a typical four hour shift working at Kmart on an average weeknight.

I worked in the party goods and health and beauty aids departments when I first got hired and that is where I put in a good amount of my seven years at the store. I would never have gotten to work in the Pharmacy if not for my time stocking adult diapers and Henry’s salad dressing.

As a part timer, I would start at 5:30 and would be there until the store closed at 9:30. That gave me four hours to get done what I needed to get done. The first thing I would do once I clocked in was talk to the full timers in my department. That usually meant two ladies that were very interesting.

Mary was the full time lady in party goods. She was quiet and a tad deranged. She belonged to some goofy church that she was always yammering about. All I wanted to find out was if there was anything she needed to get done for the next day and all she did was talk about nonsense. But compared to Cele she was a saint.

For the record, I liked Cele. And though she would never admit it, deep down she liked me. Cele was an older woman who I would guess to be in her 60’s at the time. She chain smoked L&M cigarettes and had the classic old lady who smoked too many cigarettes voice. What she did for eight hours was anyone’s guess. She could not lift anything heavier then a bottle of aspirin so that meant for the most part, the heavy lifting was left to me.

Of course Cele loved to accuse me of slacking. Her favorite line was to me was, “All you do is come in and flirt with all the girls.” Sure I did, but I also stocked more shelves in ten minutes then she would in a week. After Cele’s tongue lashing I would head out into the department.

My basic job was to listen for any calls over the loud speaker, help customers, stock items that needed replenishing, and put away unwanteds. Unwanteds were items a customer would pick up at some point and then decide later on that they did not want to purchase them. So, they would either just throw the item anywhere they saw fit, or get to the register and tell the cashier they no longer wanted to buy the item.

I usually would go row by row and pick up the items that did not belong and put them in a cart. Once I was done, I would take the cart of unwanteds to the front by the service desk and start the long task of sorting things out by department. I would grab the stray bottle of KY and four pack of Charmin and put them in a new cart so, that I could put them back in their proper place in the store. I liked doing unwanteds simply because, this gave me a chance to interact with the apparel girls.

God bless Jim Fields. Jim was the manager of the apparel department and well he was a horn dog. He stocked his area with what would be any red blooded eighteen years olds wet dream of a lineup. For the most part all the girls he hired were attractive and I was always trying out my lame material on them. Sometimes it worked, usually it didn’t but either way it was fun.

At some point during the four hours I would take my allotted fifteen minute break though rarely was this break only fifteen minutes. Since I would not eat dinner at home, I usually subsided on something from the Kmart deli for supper. Either I would get a foot long hot dog, a microwave egg roll, an order of nacho’s or a slurpee. I would wolf it down in the men’s break room that was the size of a linen closet that had smoke residue from Rich the receiving manager caked into the walls. On a daily basis this guy would smoke a pack of Pall Mall’s.

After my break and my standup routine with the apparel girls, I would make sure at the very least that the sale items were stocked. For the most part those were the items that would sell the quickest as they were on sale. These were the days of pricing guns, so we had to price each individual item in the store. I had my own gun that I hid in the back stockroom. My first encounter with my now good friend Rob involved me accusing him of stealing my gun as when I went to look for it, saw it missing and then found Rob using it.

Usually at least once during the night a customer would ask me to look for some item in the back. I was always perplexed by this. It was not like our stockroom was this magical place where we had a plethora of items that we only saved to sell to customers who were intelligent enough to ask us to look for them. In reality the Kmart stock room was pretty dense. I used to hate when I would have to cover domestics for someone on lunch or break. The domestic’s department basically consisted of yarn. Some blue haired old bag would ask me to look for some color of yarn in the back and I would have zero clue what she wanted.

Most times when a customer summoned me to look in the back, I would go back there, find someone to shoot the shit with for a minute and come back out and let them know that we did not have the item, but if they wanted to fill out a rain check I would happy to assist them.

Eventually at one point during the evening, I would also make sure to make a stop at checkouts to scope the talent. This was more of a crap shoot as the hiring was done by a woman, but there were always a couple of cute teenage girls lurking. (As a matter of fact this is where I would meet my Kmart romance, Jenny.) Linda was one of the checkout supervisors and she knew what I was up to but, I made her laugh so she never gave me shit. (She also would routinely make beer runs for me when I was underage.)

As the night wore on and closing hours loomed, I would do a last sweep of my department making sure everything was neat and organized and that there were no unwanteds that I had left behind. I would do this waiting for the call that the store was closed. Then I lose my patience as I waited for the last strangler customer to checkout so, I could punch-out and leave. I mean the night awaited where I would nosh on fast food, try to score some beer and maybe catch a bad movie at Harlem Corners. Life was good.