HuguesJohnson.com Mobile: Loser Phase Exodus - 18 Month Sentence at Super Crown 1996-1997

Summer-Fall 1996: The Setup

I was hired at Super Crown in late summer 1996 but the store I was to work at wasn't opening until November. At first it was little vague as to what I'd be doing until then. They said I'd be "training" at another nearby location. The thing is, you can pretty much do the job of a retail manager on the first day if you've ever done it before.. heck, even if you haven't. What "training" really meant was helping two other stores open up first.

Before a store can open it needs an inventory. Guess who was responsible for packing it? There was a distribution center located in Addison Illinois, it was essentially a giant warehouse with 2-4 permanent crew members. When new stores opened their full-time (salaried) staff had the pleasure of packing boxes of books for 8 hours a day. The regular warehouse staff did the day-to-day distribution tasks but extra hands were needed for new setups. It was a terribly monotonous job. A shipment of books would come from a vendor and we'd organize them into categories and repack them. The actual store setups went much faster if all the biographies were together and so on. It goes without saying that a lot of heavy lifting was involved, something I'm not exactly qualified for but I got by. The heat and complete lack of mental stimulation was worse than the physical labor.

The thing that made it the most unpleasant, but far, was the dude who ran the warehouse. He had obviously been doing work like this since ~1988, I'm sure he still is today. He had a loud stereo system there and played the entire Metallica catalog every day. When I say "the entire Metallica catalog" I mean at 8:00 precisely "Kill 'Em All" would start, by the end of "Master of Puppets" it was lunch time. And by "every day" I mean at least 9 out of 10 days. Once in a while he'd mix in some Type O Negative, never thought I'd feel relieved to hear them. I wasn't a big Metallica fan at the time, didn't dislike them but didn't own any albums either. By the end of summer every song made me nauseous. On the plus side, I was more motivated than ever to finish college.

Mercifully I was out of the warehouse by September. Since my college schedule didn't gel with an 8:00-4:30 shift I started going out to new locations to unpack the hundreds and hundreds of boxes. I worked at three locations including the one I'd be at full-time. That effort ran from 8:00 AM to 10:00 PM seven days a week. People were generally there during the hours they were originally hired to work. I'll admit this setup work wasn't all that bad. It's great how people who've never met can form this kind of natural order when presented a large task they have to accomplish together. It was a very self-regulating thing where everyone just implicitly seemed to know what to do. In the future I'd be lucky enough to work on some software development projects that functioned like this.

The other reason it was alright is that I was in charge of the computer books by nature of the fact that I knew the subject. Let's face it, most of the bookstore staff didn't know the difference between Visual Basic and C++, Windows NT and Windows 95, or PC and Mac for that matter. So I could just work away at this section for hours and get it into perfect order.

My store was the third, and last, I setup. By then it was November which meant we had to scramble. We absolutely had to be open the week of Thanksgiving and worked some zany hours to meet the deadline. Even on opening day things weren't perfect. For example, against the back wall we had a giant section to spotlight the books on the New York Time's Best Seller list. One 'e' was broken so we settled on "New York Tim's Best Seller List".