ONE case frozen peas, ah-hah-hah-hah-hah!

It's been a week.
My store has gone corporate, which is supposed to mean nothing to me now that the changeover has happened, but it sure meant something in the lead-up. Sobeys required a full inventory, and it was supervised by what seemed like battalions of Head Office personnel.
The inventory was scheduled for Friday night at 6:00. If there's a worse time to hold an inventory, I can't imagine what it might be.
Like most grocery stores, our flyers run Saturday to Friday. Whenever possible, I try to start setting up the next ad on Wednesday or Thursday to save myself a brutal Friday night. In this case, I had little choice: the ad had to be fully set up before the inventory.
The grocery store freezes while inventory is taking place. Customers can still shop the store; a reading is done before and after to determine sales. But all stocking of shelves comes to a halt: you can't run the risk of something being counted twice or not counted at all.
I had to make Friday's warehouse order as small as possible--not an easy thing to do, when it has to last through your busiest day, Saturday, and well into Sunday afternoon. The reason this order had to be so small is simple: I had no guarantees when it would arrive. Normally it comes in around one in the afternoon, but it has shown up as late as seven in the evening on occasion. My problem: depending on its arrival time, it either had to be fully worked...or remain untouched until after the inventory was completed (in other words, Saturday morning)--so that I could "count" it by referring to the invoice rather than tearing it apart piece by piece.
As it turned out, the warehouse truck pulled in at four o'clock, which gave me nowhere near enough time to work even a small order. Especially since I was so far behind...
I mentioned that the inventory team counts the shelves. They leave the walk-in cooler and freezer to us...to me.
The dairy cooler presents few challenges: I can usually count it in less than an hour, all told. The freezer is a different story.

Before I tell you why, let me tell you this: I'm pretty good at my job. Not great, but pretty good. I can usually estimate sales on ad items with reasonable accuracy. Especially when it comes to dairy products. Rarely do I get "hung" with vast quantities of sale products come the end of an ad. When I do, though, it's almost invariably a frozen item.
I'm not sure why this is. But about every third ad, I'll find myself with six or eight weeks' worth of something. And occasionally, I really overestimate demand on a product and find myself waiting impatiently for the next time it's advertised.
So my freezer can get pretty jammed.
Having known this inventory was coming, my team was able to get quite a lot to shelf. Even better, we had worked together to "mark" the inventory in there so that my "counting" consisted of writing down what had already been counted (for the most part). Yet I was still in there over two hours. The temperature in my walk-in freezer averages 0 F or -18 C; add in the two fans and it feels considerably colder (my acutely developed temperature sense would suggest a windchill factor approaching -40...which is the same on either scale.)
It's cold, in other words.
I'm not bitching--really, I'm not. Clad in only pants and a sweater, with no gloves (the better to write with), I only needed a few quick breaks. I handle cold with aplomb; it's heat I can't stand.
But the mechanics of writing in a freezer can get frustrating. Pens freeze almost instantly, of course, and I find markers difficult to write with, so I'm reduced to using pencils--the lead in which I snap effortlessly, several times an hour.
Once the cooler and freezer are counted, I have to go around my department with a pad of Post-It notes, writing the regular price of all sale items and affixing it over the sale price tags. This confuses most of our customers, but it has to be done: everything must be counted at regular retail. It gets especially aggravating for customers when I come to what are called "competitive match" items"...in my department, this means milk, butter and eggs. These are items on which we match the price of our competitors (and they match ours, too: the price of milk is the same wherever you go in this city, at least among the big chains.)
Although we sell our bagged 1% milk at $4.19, that's not the regular retail. The regular retail on four litres of 1% milk is $5.09. (And that's nowhere near our cost...we lose a lot of money on bagged milk.) But customers get very upset because they think they're going to pay $5.09 for their milk and you have to defuse dozens of them in the course of an evening. Posting signs asking customers to "disregard Post-It notes" doesn't help. This may come out wrong, but it's heartfelt and true: posting any signs, saying anything, never helps. People absolutely and steadfastly refuse to read signs. They'll notice price tags, oh, sure--an error of two cents is often treated like a Mideast flare-up--but words? Fuhgeddaboudit. And it's not as if our clientele is mostly immigrants, either: they speak English perfectly well. They just don't read it.

So it's over, now. All that's left is the aftermath. Our store number changed, so the Sobeys warehouse--who you'd think knew this was coming--suddenly has no record of our orders. You know, that kind of thing.

ARRRRRRRRRRGHHHHHHHHH!!!

There. I feel better.