No Eggs to Be Had

On Sunday the store is crazy busy when I arrive for my shift at two p.m. Carts are scattered all over the jammed parking lot. There’s rain coming, a big storm, pineapple express or atmospheric river, the possibility of flooding and mudslides, and people are stocking up as if fearful of starving. The check-out lines are already backing up into the aisles. As I pass him the produce manager tells me that the store made $23,000 worth of sales in just over an hour. “Already out of romaine lettuce and potatoes, bro.”

There’s an anxious vibe in the air, palpable, and I hear a toddler wailing as I head to the back to punch in and don my apron. I’ve got a head cold, runny nose, definitely not feeling my usual energetic self, but I’m well enough to work my shift. In fifteen months I’ve never been late or called out.

I always start by rounding up carts in the parking lot. My co-worker, R, who I’m about to relieve, is considerably more laid back when it comes to collecting carts than I am; his sense of order isn’t troubled if they jumble by the front entrance or the outdoor dining patio. R is more laid back about a lot of things, like the bathrooms and the back of the store where the cardboard baler and trash dumpsters are located. Our ideas about what constitutes neat and tidy are very different. I’ve come to expect that it takes half an hour to set things to my standards when I take over from R.

This is how, give or take, the workforce in most organizations breaks down in my experience: twenty percent of people carry the bulk of the load, twenty percent are lazy, incompetent, or both, call out with regularity, or spend as much time as they can avoiding work, and the middle sixty percent are satisfactory or average. It doesn’t take long to figure out what tier to put most people in. Some people can’t help but do more, and they form the backbone of the place, the cadre that keeps the enterprise ticking over no matter what happens. Do they gripe and bitch? Of course, but then they get on with things, and they keep showing up.

As with all relatively low-wage repetitive labor, there’s a fair amount of turnover at the Market, and one department or another is always short-staffed. For several months it was the Meat department. Now it’s the kitchen, or Prepared Foods as it’s known, which is missing a dishwasher and a cook. People come and go. One day a familiar face is absent and a new one takes its place. If you don’t know someone’s name you just call them “boss.”

The trash dumpster in the back is almost full and the two bins in the enclosure are already stuffed to capacity, which means that by the end of the night bags of meat scraps, fish guts, old cheese, sodden paper towels, dirt and whatnot will hang over the sides. Nothing I can do about it except take a plastic shovel and tamp the bags down as best I can. The blue recycling dumpster is fine, and the baler isn’t full yet. I go back to the parking lot and make another cart sweep. Chaos, again. If there’s one place where I most marvel at human stupidity it’s the parking lot. Why does this man in a black Mercedes SUV insist on parking in a space partly taken up by a cart? Does he care that the ass-end of his fine automobile is sticking out into an already narrow lane? Why didn’t he take either of the empty spaces next to him? He’s so close to the cart that I can’t extricate it from the curb and his front bumper without a crowbar. What the fuck?

Back inside, strolling through the dairy aisle, I notice that there are no eggs, not a single carton. A big dairy delivery arrives every Saturday morning, and we shouldn’t be completely out by late Sunday afternoon. This could be a supply problem or indicate that the dairy order writer didn’t order enough to get the store through the weekend. On the other hand, lately I’ve heard grocery team members talk about avian flu and wonder if that might be the reason we’re out of eggs. I’m reminded that we ran out of chicken after New Year’s Day, something that has never happened in my experience. I wonder if this is a portent of our future. As climate change wreaks havoc on agriculture, will we see periods when basic foodstuffs like eggs and chicken are unavailable?

As I make the rounds on my cleaning route I look for empty shelves, what’s out of stock. Ground pork, all gone. Distilled water likewise. No celery, either. The hot bar is depleted, but that’s the result of a shortage of labor rather than product. No cook, no food

Late in the afternoon the Chinese students begin to appear, in couples and groups of three or more. I assume they are students from UCSB because I can’t find another plausible reason for so many of them to be here, in Santa Barbara. They don’t bother me; I find the male-female couples cute in their trendy American clothes, brand-name stuff, speaking Chinese as they search for items. I have observed that they tend to drive nice cars, new cars rather than old beaters, which prompts me to consider that these are the offspring of China’s elite. How else can they afford to live and study here on the Platinum Coast of California? The university no doubt loves the foreign tuition.

I have a lot of random thoughts as I make my way around the store with my broom and dustpan, about books and politics and football and my family, of income inequality and our atomized society and loneliness.

The sky outside is leaden; rain is definitely headed our way.

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