All I Want For Christmas Is My Two...

...days off.

The holiday run-up this year was nothing short of insane. It's like that every year, of course, but this year the insanity was compounded by a new routine, a fair bit more responsibility, and customer patterns I could only guess at.

I pride myself on staying in stock on holiday-sensitive items. Nobody's perfect, of course, and I'm less perfect than many, but over the years at Price Chopper/FreshCo I'd like to think I managed it more often than not.

It's harder than it sounds. Egg nog is a case in point. The problem with egg nog is simply this: nobody buys it, nobody buys it, nobody buys it, WHAM! LET'S VACUUM UP ALL THE EGG NOG!, egg nog? why the hell would I buy that?

Seriously, after New Year's you can offer people money to buy egg nog and they'll look at you as if to say money? I doan need no steekin' money. 

Making it harder: us peons down here at store level aren't the only ones who know about this problem with egg nog. The dairies know it too, which is why they only make so much. After a certain time--you never know quite when it will be, but it's usually half past I need some...there's no egg nog to be had.

Which means I had to lay in my nog a week and a half early.

Then there's the warehouse. You can never guess what they'll run short of in any given holiday season. Traditionally it's hash browns, the sales of which triple in December...but I've seen butter go bye-bye a week before Christmas. I've seen creamed cheese unavailable. And this year it was our store brand sour cream, out of stock since early December with no firm date in sight when it might be back in stock. And so: ninety cases of name brand sour cream, better order it quick while they still have that. 

Tack on all the distributions (hey! Let's put yogurt on sale Christmas week, everyone bastes their turkey with yogurt!) and account for the general uptick in sales and for a little while this past Thursday morning I could not close the door to my dairy cooler. This has never happened to me.

And still I ran out of things. I ordered double what the computer said I would sell in vanilla ice cream and ran out before Christmas Eve started. We were out of our brand of butter for a few hours. (And then of course there's the aerosol whip creams, of which I have about a year's supply.

Still--not bad for a rookie in this store, if I do say so myself. And there's a good group of people here. I'm starting to feel--not quite like I belong, exactly, but that I might belong. Which is a good feeling, a merry feeling.

But boy, have I been stiff. Getting out of bed over the past week has become progressively more difficult. And so I am cherishing these two days off.

Merry Christmas to everyone.