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.

 

It Was A Woman’s World

When I first started writing blogs (September 2014) I couldn’t really have guessed just how they would be received. Would anyone read them? Would they get some lip service? Would they be genuinely liked? Who knew?

One particular earlyish effort was merely blogged because I was looking forwards to the return of the Sky 1 programme ‘Trollied’ – mainly because I used to work at a supermarket and found it was very close to the mark in its observations! I didn’t for a second think  that it would ultimately become the most popular blog I've written to date!

So on the back of that ‘Getting Trollied Again’ blog, I thought I’d give a further insight into those glorious retail years:

As previous readers will know, I spent the formative years of my employment working in a supermarket.
My first couple of years were enjoyed as a student on the Produce section and checkouts, before moving to working on the Delicatessen counter, initially as a student, but then as a full time member of staff once I’d left Sixth Form and was undecided about what I wanted to do with my life. So many people fall into this route, and I actually really enjoyed it for a long time before finding something outside of retail when I was in my early mid twenties.

A picture of a Deli Counter. Not mine though - I had some staff behind mine

After learning the Deli role inside out for a couple of years, I was fortunate enough to get a promotion to become the new Delicatessen Manager at a store in Brighton, starting just three days after my 21^st birthday.

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 day in that new role, and indeed the first couple of months.

What could be so wrong?

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

1.       I was introduced to them on the first day as God.

2.       I was young.

3.       I was male.

Being introduced as The Almighty was horrendously embarrassing. 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 Delicatessen 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.
Had I not been their manager, and just been joining as an assistant, I doubt it would have irked them so much, but 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 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’

This would take some skill to turn them!

Altogether I had 17 staff initially, 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. 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?

All this made me think that perhaps the dislike of me from these people who I felt didn’t know me from Adam, might actually be a bit misplaced through gossip, so I tried not to fret too much about it.

Rather soon, I lost my senior assistant to another department. She had also applied for the Deli Manager’s job and failed to get it, and she wanted some more responsibility. She was fair to me in that she knew it wasn’t my fault, but she wanted to be appreciated and after she helped settle me in, I was happy to help her get a promotion to another role in the store.

Perhaps I didn’t help improve my standing with the others though as when appointing her replacement, I (fairly) opted for the best person, following interviews. As it happened, 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.

After a few weeks had passed, they started speaking to me again...

Time heals, and ultimately as a team, we all contributed to making our Deli the best performing counter in the district, and second best in the region. Given we were bottom of that list before I’d arrived, I was very proud of the work we’d all done.

My reward was to be appointed as the Delicatessen District Trainer for our area, which in turn made our counter the jewel in the area that other Deli Managers came from afar to admire and seek advice from, which thankfully, my lovely staff took immense satisfaction out of and ultimately meant I had earned their respect.

Fair play to some of the stronger critics, as when I reluctantly moved on from the store, they apologised for their preconception of me and offered that I’d actually been a pretty good manager when all was said and done! Praise from them was more important than praise from above, and the best compliment I could pay them back in return was that the two years I spent at that branch were two of the best years of my working life.

Looks like a prison hospital doesn't it!?

Leaving was a huge wrench. A destructive one too, as 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.

Those 8 months were as bad as the previously 24 had been good.

I’d gained promotion on the basis that I completed a pilot assessment centre training course for Managers seeking advancement. I had furthermore been promised to be fast tracked through the full management course as specifically I had management experience under my belt already.. Ideally it wouldn't take anymore than 6 months to get fully qualified and trained up before I’d be given a proper large department of my own to manage.

But literally the week I moved to my new placement, they changed it. Who they were, I’m still not sure, but I got thrown in with a dozen or so university graduates on a post-graduate scheme and no such real opportunity arose for an actual promotion.
Essentially, despite 8 years with the company, starting from joining in 1991 and working 10 hours a week as a school boy to what I’d recently achieved,  I now had to complete a mandatory full year of training – literally I was told I had to relearn how to stock shelves!

Just to rub salt into the wounds, the university grads went straight on to a starting salary that was nearly £6000 higher than me! If it wasn’t for real it would've been hilarious.

I should say that at no time did I blame the grads – It wasn’t their fault at all. Indeed they had a huge amount of sympathy for me being entrapped in this time wasting slavery scheme, and two of them were placed at the same store I was. They were two of the nicest girls I could have hoped to be paired with and they at least made my time at the store much more bearable.

When I resigned, the District Manager offered apologies and said I’d been earmarked to have been a ‘40 yearer’ with the company – the store manager added that in his opinion, the company had failed me ‘criminally’.

It was a sad end to my time in retail really, and prior to October 1998, I couldn’t have envisaged my departing so soon. But all in all the 8 years were mostly pretty good, and watching Trollied on Sky 1 brings back some fab and funny memories.

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

But no! NO! NO! NO!

Getting Trollied again

Updated and Revised Blog for 2016!

Very pleased to find out that the Sky One sitcom ‘Trollied’ is returning for a sixth series this Autumn. I absolutely love this show, and hopefully this season will hit the same heights as before.

Having worked in a supermarket from age 15 until I escaped aged 23, I can very much relate to the events in Trollied, and feel warmed by knowing that not much has changed in day-to-day supermarket shenanigans since I left in 1999.

Viewers of the show that haven’t worked in a supermarket before, might find it all a bit odd and not very funny at all. Crass even.

But if you’ve done your time in food retail, like I did for over 8 years, then you will know. You will just know how accurate some of the apparent outlandish storylines actually are.

You name it, if it’s been on Trollied, then I’ve recognised that it’s actually happened (and probably still happening) in real life.

Such as, staff:

…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 flying headbutt into a pallet of 200 egg boxes)

…having sex in the warehouse (didn’t witness this(!) but it definitely happened fairly often)

…being chucked in the baler (the new kids on Produce)

…eating food off the shopfloor (happened on a daily basis)

…describing fruit shapes to old ladies using genitalia innuendo (too many to mention)

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

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

Another staple of Trollied are the undertones of relationships. The amount of relationships that interweaved in the stores I worked in were innumerable, and ‘incestuous’ was often the term used to describe them. I remember rumours of one person who had relations of sorts with at least a dozen other members of staff from the same store… 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 22, and she was only 34, but her 12 year seniority on me was quite something to experience! I was probably far too shy for my own good with her... :-)
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!

One particular highlight was someone taking the time to put a prank call in to Customer Services in the summer of 1996. Using the tannoy to broadcast to over a thousand staff and customers, the innocent young checkout assistant boomed:

“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 even work for the supermarket, but had done it for a mate of his whose last day it was.

So Trollied is very realistic and should be a real eye opener to those who think its fiction. It isn’t!

And as I’m feeling kind, I’ll leave you with a top tip: Never buy grated parmesan from a deli counter…

Stop Press: 
More Trollied / Supermarket life blogging:

It Was A Womans World (Trollied Part 2)