Trollied Revisited

Okay so I know I ‘retired’ from blogging in 2015, but I didn’t say it was going to be forever! That said, this is not a full blown return to writing – it’s more like revisionism rather than recidivism.

Apparently it is good blogging etiquette for bloggers to go back and update old blogs with new light through old windows, although one could interpret this as the blogger has become lazy and / or so dull that they’ve run out of topics…

In short, I’m still on sabbatical but just fancied penning a final update to a couple of my most viewed blogs during the period I was actively writing.

This was triggered by watching a re-run of the Sky One comedy Trollied – a show which past readers will know I really enjoy, due to drawing comparisons with my own 8 years working for a major supermarket.

Shamelessly I've even tried soliciting for a cameo on the show, but unsurprisingly I have thus far been unsuccessful!

So anyways, this piece of writing is going to dip back in to tart up the originals, and add a couple of new bits… if you are willing to stay the course!

Trollied Revisited

So, the series link on my tellybox has informed me that Trollied is back for a SIXTH series this Autumn! This means I can once again spend several autumn nights reminiscing about how little has changed in the world of supermarket retail since I escaped in 1999. Having completed nearly eight custodial years, starting at the tender age of 15 years and 3 months (wouldn’t happen these days), it’s fair to say that I left (aged 23) with some interesting experiences, and not least a few life skills, such as:

• How to operate dangerous slicing machinery when drunk

• How to throw and catch rat poison traps

• What’s appropriate to eat on the shop floor – and what’s not

• How to go ‘missing’ when you’re in a store you don’t like working at

• How to keep your staff happy
• And how to piss your staff off

• How NOT to grate Parmesan
• And why no-one should EVER buy freshly grated Parmesan

…and that’s just off the top of my head over the last minute or so.

To those who have never seen Trollied, upon first viewing it might all seem a bit odd, and borderline crass at points. What they should be in no doubt about at all though is just how realistic Trollied really is. If you’ve done your time in food retail, then you will recognise exactly how accurate some of the apparent outlandish storylines actually are.

For the vast majority of the characters on screen there’s someone I can name from my time in store who IS that person. In fact the only thing that Trollied rightly chooses not to dwell on too much is the fact that some (not many) of the managers back in the day could be quite nasty individuals.

I’d like to hope that particular point has changed now.

So in comparison, and in addition to the storylines in Trollied, here are just a few blasts from the staff of the past:

• Sleeping on top of the warehouse chillers (knew a guy that did this at least once a week)

• Performing knee slides across the floor on night shift (every night)

• Wilfully damaging goods (I saw a guy do a meticulously planned flying headbutt into a pallet of 200 egg boxes) – in fact this same guy willingly let someone set fire to his hair in the canteen, just to see how fast it would burn. He also had a diary where he could mark off how many days it would be before he went sick again, without him being sacked for persistent absence. Oh and he also often spoke of wanting to put an end to his wife. Yes wife, not life. Something involving a train I think.

• Sex acts in the warehouse (didn’t witness this [or partake!] but it happened fairly often – and also in the customer toilets on nightshifts)

• Being chucked in the baler (the new kids on Produce)

• Eating food from the shopfloor shelves (standard practise)

• Describing fruit shapes to old ladies using genitalia innuendo (too many to mention, but mamba and aubergines are words that spring to mind... oh and horned melons)

• The legendary tannoy broadcast “This is a customer announcement. There is an urgent call for Mike Hunt, who is shopping in the store today. Please can Mike Hunt come to Customer Services” (I kid you not.) Later that night, by pure fluke, I actually met the bloke who put the prank call in. Turns out he didn’t work for us, but had done it for a mate of his whose last day it was.

• Managers ‘stealing’ other managers’ cars, parking them halfway across town and letting the tyres down (I loved working at that branch!)

• The Produce boy who happened to accidentally glance at the Bakery girl who was collecting strawberries from the warehouse. So she says to him “What the f*ck are you looking at?” ... Five years later they were married #romancenotdead

It’s not an exhaustive list by any means, but you get the gist.

Ultimately, it’s all about the people, and I would still insist that most of the people I worked with were tip top characters, but that didn’t stop some of them being a bit odd!

Having been around for a few years, I was fortunate enough to get promotion a couple of times. The main one was becoming the new Delicatessen Manager at a store in Brighton, starting just three days after my 21^st birthday.

A Deli Counter. Not mine though... Mine was in colour

It’s fair to say that up till that point of my retail career, I’d seen a few things that had opened my naïve innocent young eyes a little, but nothing prepared me for the response I received on my first few weeks in that new role.

What could go so wrong?

Well specifically it was three things that made some of my new staff not that keen on me:

• I was introduced to them on the first day as God.
• I was young.
• I was male.

I was already feeling over exposed at the oversized tent of a suit I had to wear, but being introduced as The Almighty sank me lower than the Titanic. It was horrendously embarrassing, and I have no idea why my introducer opted to say that, but I think maybe because he had been looking after the counter in the absence of a manager and wanted them to think I was there to ‘save’ them. I REALLY had to underplay that title in the first few weeks to stave off fears of being called arrogant. Talk about a stitch up.

As for ‘being young and male’ – well they both sound ridiculously ancient don’t they? But it was a genuine issue as Deli counters traditionally (although not exclusively) had been a rather female dominated environment, and here I was, this 'boy', taking over the running of their baby and many of them were not at all comfortable with it. To them, I was the Anti Milky-Bar Kid in more ways than one.

It took a ton of effort to win certain staff over and prove I was worthy.

For example, during that first week I remember cleaning out the bins. I wanted to muck in and do everything and not be some aloof ‘suit’, so I thought this might help somewhat. Nope. The opposite in fact, as this action extremely upset one of the senior ladies as she’d done the bins on Thursdays for the last twelve years, and boy had I now stepped on her toes!

Whilst she was being comforted and consoled by another elder stateswoman (because she WAS in tears), my confidence wasn’t helped by the deliberately loud comment ‘I told them we should have been given a woman manager’

Lovely, heart warming stuff…

Altogether I had 17 staff, which included two male students, three female students, and the rest were females old enough to be my mother or grandmother. It would be wrong though to say that ALL the elder females didn’t want me there.

One Scottish lady in particular took to me quite early on and stated that she felt I’d been a bit stitched up, and that even before I’d arrived I was on a hiding to nothing as a colleague of mine at my previous branch had popped in the week before to ‘advise’ them about me. 

Her assessment being:

‘He’s a nice guy, but he’s not up to being a manager’

...which was ironic given that less than 12 months earlier, I’d had to cover her sorry ass over a Christmas period when she couldn’t cope when acting up as a deputy manager herself.

Bod was RUBBISH at Murder in the Dark

It was a shame to be knifed in the back before I’d even started, but she’d always been a touch bitter, having felt mistreated by the firm over her own career path over the years. I felt sorry for her but why try and hurt me?

Perhaps I didn’t help improve my standing with the others though as when appointing a senior assistant, I fairly opted for the best person. Following interviews, this happened to be another male.

The furore that kicked off simply because I’d given the job to a male was unbelievable. It took intervention from the Personnel Manager to sort out the ridiculous complaints (sexism, ageism, experience-ism!) that arose because of it. If it was sexism they were looking for, the staff on the Fresh Meat Counter were only three steps to the right!

Eventually they started speaking to me again, though it was probably several weeks later. In truth, their gripes were harmless – they just had certain standards that they felt were still viable.

I’m sure a lot of it was simply a generational thing, rather than a personal attack, and as such, when we see the Miriam Margolyes character in Trollied, I’m always reminded of a dear old lady on my team. Let’s call her Joan.

When I took up the role, Joan was already formally retired and worked two days a week, and in those 1990’s days of blossoming equality, she demanded to be treated as everyone else on the Deli counter – and rightfully so.

After a while she chose to ‘further’ retire and cut her hours down to just one day a week. This was fine, and I didn’t really give it much thought… but on the day of her retirement she refused to serve on the counter until she’d been given a retirement present by the store manager.

Staff that had been there long before me said this was now the FOURTH retirement she’d had (one day a week less each year) and frankly they were fed up with continuing to cough up money for her. We got over it by me buying her something out of my own pocket, under the auspices of a collection.

Joan was over the moon with the piece of wooden tat that ‘we’ had got her, but later that same day, she ran off from the counter crying.

One of the temporary staff members had told a customer that they’d be better off going to a rival store as we were rubbish, and Joan being the loyal soul that she was, took this comment as a personal insult to her, and she refused now to work with this "traitor!" – her words, not mine.

So now I had to be a peace maker and nigh on beg the offender to apologise to her. He was a radical, right wing political type (studying economics and politics at university) and this didn’t sit well with him at all, but thankfully he said sorry to Joan as a favour to me… but left me in the crap less than a week later by just not ever turning up again!

I wouldn’t say Joan came out of this well either though, as again on that SAME day, I had to leave early and caught her getting on the same bus as me, fully 30 minutes before she was supposed to clock off. Having been well and truly busted, she steered clear of causing me any grief again for a while.

Another staple of Trollied are the undertones of relationships. In all the stores I worked in, there was an incestuous undertone. Funny at times, but lurid at others.

On a personal note, no-one really fancied me much anyway, but I tended to try and steer clear of dating anyone from work. In fact I only indulged two or three times, which was enough, as it took no time at all for rumours to spread around the store as to what happened on such inter-staff dates.

One girl I went out with got bullied because I put in an order for her to have a new hat to wear on the Deli. ALL staff had to wear hats and she had simply lost hers. That was interpreted as ‘to get a new hat you must sleep with the Deli Manager’

It obviously didn’t mean that and, for the record: 
NO... I didn’t!

Then there was the checkout girl who had relations of sorts with at least a dozen other members of staff from the same store (seven in the same night if rumours are to be believed)… and frankly I lost count of the amount of senior managers visiting the customer toilets with checkout girls. And boys.

I even had my own brush with a ‘Mrs Robinson’ experience. To be fair I was 21, and she was only 34…but her 13 year seniority on me was quite something to experience! Additionally, when I was 19 I was accused of having an affair with my female manager, who was well into her 50’s #shudder … and NO, I didn’t do that either!

Care to do a stock check Elaine?

My last move within the company was sold as a promotion, but ultimate it lead to me departing the job within 8 months. Within a week of working at my new store, I knew I wouldn't be staying long. That was October 1998, and I left the company in May 1999, and those last 8 months were as bad as the previously 24 months had been good. This is detailed in the other blogs (see links below), but suffice to say it meant it brought a sadder ending to my time in retail than had been the prologue.

All in all the 8 years were mostly pretty good, and watching Trollied brings back some fab and funny memories. It’s very realistic and should be a real eye opener to those who think it is fiction. It isn’t!

Would I want to go back to retail though? Well never say never.

But no! NO! NO! NO!

So there you go – and just for fun (and to boost the site hit counter), the two original untouched blogs can be found by clicking the links below, so fill your boots:

Getting Trollied Again

It Was A Woman's World

And as I’m feeling kind, I’ll leave you with TWO top tips:

1. Never buy grated parmesan from a deli counter… 
2. When a can of beans rattles with a thud rather than a slosh. Don’t look inside.