I need advice for working at 7-Eleven

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
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Day 12 was scheduled as 3-11p on a Friday night and ended up being 3-11:30 or so because my ride was late getting there.

For the first half hour or so of my shift, I was very flustered because my scanner kept ringing things up twice. I was able to settle it down, though.

Big news of the day was a tornado that came within about a mile of us. I didn’t see it, though. A customer came in with pictures later, and we counted ourselves very fortunate.

We stocked some winter clothing – caps, gloves, and scarves, as well as ice scrapers. My mentor also taught me how to stock the donuts.

A 7Now (DoorDash) order came in but we couldn’t find what they were looking for, or even see an indication that we stocked it (Gushers), so we cancelled it.

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I can’t even imagine ordering this alone.

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That’s the only damn thing this person wanted! It probably would’ve cost thrice the price of the item in delivery charges alone. They’re better off.

I needed to call my boss and have her help me with it, though. By the way, that damn 7Now app is very insistent in beeping the living daylights out of itself if you don’t start it when it wants you to. I must have heard the alert ten times.

Speaking of emergency alerts… Mom and I went past the 7-Eleven on the way home today. There’s a job site across the street and a little ways down the road, with a lot of concrete pipes. Some of them were shattered into a million pieces by that tornado. I swear to you, it couldn’t have been more than a mile away. We got the alert, but I never saw the tornado. Very sobering.

Last night, there was a couple that came in that was traveling from their current home in South Carolina up to their old stomping grounds in Maryland so that the husband could continue his cancer treatment. The guy’s wife was an absolute hoot. She was like, “How can you not smell the weed outside?” (Recreational marijuana is legal here in Virginia, though.) And my co-worker couldn’t smell it because he smokes it himself all the time. But I could.

I told the man that I would pray for his cancer treatment to go well, and for a safe journey for them.

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You can be a lot closer than a mile and not see a tornado. They are sobering.

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Right out of high school I worked in a West Texas convenience store for a few years, mostly graveyard shift, until I could decide what I wanted to do. That was so long ago, it was probably quite a different experience. There was no lottery. I remember the excitement when we switched to an electronic cash register – cool at the time, but it would be a museum piece now. But one thing I can tell you that probably has not changed: In a robbery, just hand over the money and don’t give any trouble. I was held up three times, only once of them on the graveyard shift.

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That would be awfully expensive! Maybe he should contact a restaurant supply company.

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I kinda figured he was pulling my leg just to fuck with me, so I didn’t make any suggestions on how to acquire that many jars of peanut butter. (Anyway, 40 wouldn’t be nearly enough to fill a bathtub, let alone a swimming pool.) In any event, I didn’t think about a restaurant supply company.

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Maybe he should have contacted Iggy Pop.

(rimshot)

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Days 13 and 14.

Worked a 2p-8p on Monday. Fairly ordinary except that someone brought their dog in, carrying it in her arms most of the time, and when she let it down, it pissed on the mat just inside the store. UGH.

I got home, watched an episode of Zorro, and relaxed, and I was in my bed at 11 p.m. when I got a call from my boss. One of my coworkers, who was supposed to work the overnight shift, called in because she woke up vomiting. She’s got a work ethic bigger than the whole city, so I believe her when she says she’s really sick. The boss asked if I could come in and work until 7 in the morning. The first four hours of my shift, I would be by myself.

OH SHIT.

I told her I wasn’t really comfortable being there by myself, but she said she thought I could handle it, and that the coworker whom I just finished working with would give me a crash course in what to do, that the overnight shift was actually pretty easy, and that if I needed them, text them. She also told me that I’d get paid an extra $3 an hour for the time I was there by myself.

Well, then.

I came in, and got the crash course, and wrote some things down that were important to remember. And actually, you know what? It really wasn’t all that bad, being there by myself. Another coworker came in at 3 in the morning, and took a little bit of the pressure off of me, and though every now and then we had enough of a rush to make me wonder if the gates of Hell had opened up and all the demons started pouring out, it really was a pretty easy shift.

Biggest problem I had was, I cooked the wrong side of the hot dog grill, and had to write off several hot dogs that got burned. I overthought the problem. I need to remember to go by the colors red and blue and not by the ambiguous “front” and “back”, because front and back mean different things depending on which side of the grill you’re on.

I cooked the pizza and the chicken at the appropriate time, in preparation for a rush from the next-door Target Distribution Center that didn’t actually arrive until after I was no longer alone.

So basically, I put myself under a lot of pressure; I mean, I was literally sweating the first half-hour or so, but it really wasn’t all that bad.

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That’s great! It sounds like it was stressful, but you handled it very well.

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This sounds like me and so many people I know. Congratulations on the success and on surviving an extremely long day.

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Thanks, and now I get to take advantage of a free slot in the laundry schedule to do three much-needed loads of laundry, including my work shirt, and cook dinner tonight.

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Good on you for accepting the shift and hanging tough. I’ve worked a lot of graveyard and it hasn’t been too bad, more often than not I’d get done and have to wait around before I could stuff like prep for the morning rush on coffee and food.

And having gained some experience is good for those times when you get stuck on your own.

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Hehehe, I do it. Most of my job involves never talking to the customer. Most of the time I have other co-workers who are dealing with the customer, and I handle the technical problems on the back end of the machine when they can’t hack it. If I can’t hack it, I send the problem to people who have the source code as their daily job. I brief my co-workers on what I’m (or others are) doing and my co-worker handles 95% of the communication with the customer. I’m at least really ok-ish at that, and fix a lot of problems without direct customer interaction.

But around 5% of the time, It’s necessary for me to get on a call and either talk to the customer to figure out what is actually going on or just to calm them down and get them to a point where they will let us do the needful. I (almost) ALWAYS stress myself out in the last few minutes before those calls are going to happen. Most of the time, when actually on the call I impress my co-worker at how I don’t seem excited or nervous when talking to the customer, even when the customer is severely agitated. My manner seems to calm them.

But that’s because at that time I’m doing my thing and trying to charm the customer so I can do my thing without interruption. I’m not freaking out about what the problems might be, I’m dealing with what they actually are, for the most part. The latter is easier than the former, in my experience.

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I worry about anyone working a late shift in a mini-mart and the potential for stickups - especially knowing that you worked an overnight shift alone part of the time. Has your 7-Eleven experienced any robberies? Have you been taught how to respond?

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I haven’t been taught how to respond, no. This is a fairly safe part of town, but robberies have happened in other areas of town. This is probably something I should bring up with my boss.

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I was wondering that too. I used to work the overnight shift at Eckerd’s. College kids would steal from us all the time and just run out the door, but once the pharmacy was robbed at gunpoint while we cashiers in the front of the store didn’t even realize it.

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You respond by staying perfectly calm (at least on the outside) and doing everything they ask you to do while you quietly pray they won’t kill you anyway just for the thrill of it.

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Day 15.

A 2-8 on a Wednesday.

A customer gave me a $100 bill on a three-dollar transaction, and I had no twenties to give her. She probably doesn’t even have the standard undocumented migrant excuse, either. (Most of the hundreds we get come from Hispanics who are paid in cash because they don’t have bank accounts.)

Someone crashed their car through the cart return inside the nearby Walmart earlier that morning. Our biggest regular customer was within 50 feet of it and told us the story from his point of view.

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“Sorry, I thought that said ‘car return’, my bad.”