Jeannie
“The company was right there when I had COVID. What other company would delivery groceries to your door? What other company would pick up your prescription and take it to you? What other company would call you every single day to see how you’re doing? Now you know why people like working here.”
Sometime between March 10, 2020 and March 30, 2020, grocery stores – no matter how large – transformed into local markets. There were so many unknowns – so many questions about whether grocery stores would continue to stock items. What if trucks stopped delivering food? What if stores simply ran out of food? What if manufacturing sites stopped producing goods? Would customers be assigned a day and time to shop?
Trips to the grocery store were at once alarming and reassuring. Shelves were almost completely bare where bleach, toilet paper, hand soap, cleaning supplies and flour once were. And yet, as isolation measures grew more and more severe, for many people, that hour at the grocery store was their one time a week to leave their homes and connect with someone outside of themselves. The familiar faces of grocery workers became a thread of consistency during lonely days when consistency had all but lost its meaning.
What may have once been brief pleasantries at the check-out counters, had turned into full conversations – providing critically needed human interaction. At the front of the stores, workers stood and greeted customers, assuring them of the safety measures in the stores. The voices – and laughter – of the grocery workers and customers offered some promise of better days to come, if only because the virus could not dampen the friendships that quickly grew from within the walls of local grocers.
Grocery workers did not have the luxury of isolation and distance. In those frightening, early days of the pandemic, they went to work – seeing more customers, regularly en masse than they had before. Guarded by facemasks, gloves and eventually plastic screens, grocery workers showed up – quietly and humbly to ensure others could stay home, comfortably and with the food and goods they needed.
Jeannie is one of these grocery workers and this is her story, in her own words.
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I am a cashier at Albertsons and this is my retirement job. I’m going to be 72 in May. I retired when I reached 66 and had full retirement, but I stayed working here. I’ve got 42 years in. I was in management for many, many years and have done a number of things for the company. I’ve been through all kinds of changes. I’ve worked at Lomas and Montgomery, Juan Tabo, Rio Rancho stores. I’ve worked two different times in California during strikes.
I started off at a Skaggs Supercenter on October 18, 1978. It was very hard to get into the grocery business at that time because nobody would quit. But, I knew I could do it. A lot of people were going to cashier classes and I said, “I don’t need that. I know I can do it.” I started working for the company and then it just took off. I wound up being in management and the most I managed at one point was 247 people.
I’ve done a lot of organizing, community events, training, intertwining with the high schools and getting the kids to come to work. We’re like one big old family – everybody gets along and we work together as a team. We don’t work for one department. We work for United Grocers out of Texas, so we all pitch in together. I’ve had nothing but fun with the company.
When COVID started, what made those days better was that we were really, really fortunate to be in the grocery business because we had our jobs. We just came to work, tried to take care of ourselves, tried to sanitize everything to keep COVID away as much as we possibly could, not just for the sake of the customer, but for the sake of the employees. In that respect, we were very fortunate and just kept hoping for the best.
I was able to adjust to COVID, but I saw a lot of customers really going through a hard time and in my opinion, the ones that really hurt the worst were the kids. They didn’t have a summer. They couldn’t go to the movies or go swimming; they couldn’t visit their friends or do outdoor activities. The whole thing has been very difficult, but from what I can see, it also brought families together. They’re finally having dinner together. This kids finally know their parents. People learned to appreciate a lot – and they learned to cook.
People were not used to going to grocery stores. People were used to going to restaurants to eat. Because of that, the businesses were not ready for this drastic change – including the manufacturers, like toilet paper companies. They couldn’t keep the supply. We were not ready for the increase of customers – no one was. We were just blown away, working 40, 50 hours. The checkout lines were to the back of the stores, and lines were outside. People started to panic because there was talk of months of shutdown at that time.
We brought in a lot of generic items – flour, sugar, spaghetti – in order to be able to provide the customers with something. We knew we would have food; it might not have been what everyone wanted, but we knew we could get people food. We put a limit on how much people could buy – meat, toilet paper, water – so that everyone could get something if they needed it.
People were buying back-eyed peas, beans – navy beans. Things that you cook and things that people wouldn’t eat before because they were on Keto diets! I would laugh and ask, “What happened to the Keto? Where’s the Keto diet?” People were buying flour and sugar and molasses and anything to cook. All of a sudden, people turned to cooking. It was a different world overnight and Keto went out the door, ‘cause then it was a matter of survival.
In early October, Jeannie started to feel sick.
It started on a Monday – I wasn’t feeling well. Then Tuesday, I wasn’t working and I was freezing that night. I called work and said I can’t come in. On Wednesday, I still didn’t feel good and called in for sick on Thursday. My daughter’s a registered nurse in Atlanta and I spoke to a doctor there. I said I was cold and I ached, and she told me to get up and go to the hospital. I went to Presbyterian and they gave me an EKG, took my oxygen levels and took me outside of the building to get COVID testing. Then they took X-rays and told me I had pneumonia, and that I had COVID. I asked the doctor, “Am I gonna die?” He said, “No, you’re not that bad yet” and he gave me antibiotics. I didn’t believe him and asked another doctor before I left, “Am I gonna die?” I quarantined myself at home. The store was totally awesome. They delivered all of my food, my drinks, my prescriptions and everything. Knocked on the door and left it outside. I was down for three weeks. Then it went away overnight one night – that fast. I took another test and it was negative, and I called the store and said, “I’m coming back to work.”
I love my customers – that’s why I haven’t retired. Most of the people in this type of business care about customers. They go the extra mile for customers. I left management; I have fun with the customers at my register. To me, the best part of the business is the customer. At this store, it’s like a little, community store – everyone knows everyone. If we didn’t work in an essential business like this, we’d be sitting at home with nobody to talk to. That’s a positive – we come to work and have people to talk to instead of just being shut in. I work 40 hours a week on my feet, but I’m not at home. I’m able to be here with the customers.
