[Previous chapter] [The Corner Shop: Autumn 2000–Summer 2001 (Three evenings per week)]
Toward the end of the first year of my A-levels I grew weary of having my weekends taken up by work; and the approaching summer holidays would demand my availability for music festivals, gigs, sleepovers in friends’ garages, parties at the houses of acquaintances whose parents had foolishly left them there alone, road-trips, camping trips, and a family holiday to Cornwall.
But once I was back at The Sixth Form College, and penniless again, I would need another Job to fund my teenage social life, and the associated cigarettes, alcohol, music magazines, CDs and second-hand clothes. For the first time in my life I addressed my Joblessness proactively; at least that’s how I remember it. It’s possible that my mother instigated the process as usual. But I do know that I chose The Corner Shop, because I distinctly recall my motivation for the choice—the same that had led me to my very first Proper Job: that being a girl.
Just to fill in the gaps for you, Prospective Employer, because you’re probably wondering what became of my long-standing devotion to Tigwillow: well, our correspondence had ground to a halt entirely by the previous year. And by the time I was established in my new and more exciting life at The Sixth Form College, where I could wear my own clothes, make my own friends, and stare out of windows wistfully in the breaks between lessons, I’d finally decided to say goodbye to Tigwillow (admittedly many months after she’d stopped replying to my letters) thus releasing myself—and her, so I imagined—from the burden of our doomed love. I was still writing to one or two of my old North Wales friends, but I hadn’t seen any of them for ages either; and I would gradually strike up new pen-pal arrangements with fellow disaffected teenagers I’d met on the unofficial Manic Street Preachers chat-room that my best friend Wayne frequented, and which he’d introduced me to. This chat-room was a regular part of our social lives from the tail-end of our GCSEs up until the time we left for university; but it had already taken a back-seat to our offline (AKA IRL) socializing over the first year of college. I’d had a protracted crush on the friend of a girl who had a crush on me during much of the time I was working in The Women’s Clothes Shop; but since this situation was unsatisfactory for everyone involved, I knew I had to try to find another object for my affection—ideally this time one who wasn’t completely oblivious and/or indifferent to me; because I’d found that to be an even less romantic arrangement when they were actually being oblivious and/or indifferent to me while in the same room.
Well: it just so happened that I’d noticed a pretty girl had started Work at The Corner Shop near The Suburban Culdesac. We’d exchanged brief words and a polite laugh about how she was unable to sign in to her till because she’d forgotten how, before I was summoned to the next till by her middle-aged Superior. A few weeks later, I noticed a sign in the window saying they were looking for another new Member of Staff. So I applied with a hastily typed CV detailing my by-now considerable Work Experience, including a full run-down of my almost-entirely irrelevant GCSE grades. I was contacted by telephone the following day and invited to an Interview that weekend.
A middle-aged Bosswoman greeted me curtly and led me into her office, where I was instructed to sit on a milk-crate or something in the corner. She was much bigger than me, and because she was sitting on a chair and I was on a milk-crate or something, I felt Intimidated and Nervous from the start. She asked me about my previous Jobs, so I told her everything I’ve told you, Prospective Employer—or as much as seemed Appropriate in the circumstances. She nodded encouragingly throughout, which gradually put me at ease. It was pretty generic stuff. I recall only one of her questions word-for-word, and only because of the answer I gave.
The question:
“What do you think makes for a productive workplace?”
My answer began with some mumbling, and characteristically progressed toward Rambling. And then I said:
“…of course, I think it’s important to get off with other members of staff…”
She nodded.
“Sorry—I mean ‘get on with other members of staff’—” I corrected myself.
She nodded.
“Obviously,” I added—before trying to cover up my mistake with some hasty Rambling about how important Customers were, as my face grew progressively redder. I already knew what a “Freudian slip” was because I was studying A-level Psychology (for some reason). But I hadn’t believed it was a real thing; because most of the things we learnt about in A-level Psychology were quite obviously not real things.
I got the Job. So perhaps the middle-aged Bosswoman agreed with the original sentiment. Or perhaps she wanted to "get off" with me?! Or—which seems likelier than either—she hadn’t actually been listening at all.
The Role
The Corner Shop wasn’t on a corner. At least the entrance wasn’t. And it was more like a Miniature Supermarket; but that’s not a widely accepted term, according to the combined authority of Google and Wikipedia. We’ll call the pretty girl who unwittingly inspired me to apply for the Job “Tesco Girl”—both because The Corner Shop wasn’t a Tesco Express, and in homage to the song “Tesco Girl” by Austrian extreme metal band Cadaverous Condition; and because this mimics the real nickname by which I would continue to think of her and refer to her when discussing her with my friends. In the interim between my first meeting with Tesco Girl and my Job Interview, which was only a week or two, The Corner Shop had bafflingly rebranded as an entirely different miniature supermarket altogether—again: neither of these was a Tesco Extra—so in real life, Tesco Girl was (unbeknownst to her) stuck with a nickname that had ceased to be factually accurate.
My role at The Corner Shop was much like my role in any of the other shops I’d worked in. There was a till. I had to learn how to use it. And my experience with the various other tills I’d used didn’t help at all because this was a completely different till. I was to go slightly beyond the briefs I’d accepted at the other shops though, in that this time I would be taught how to replace a till-roll once the receipts stopped printing. Card-payments were accepted at The Corner Shop; but they had to be phoned through by my Superior, Nikki, who we’ll call Julie in order to protect her identity. Julie was not the middle-aged Bosswoman who’d interviewed me; I never saw her again. Julie was a year older than me and working at The Corner Shop part time while studying at The College in The Railway Town for a BTEC in hospitality or something. I didn’t know what a BTEC was, or what hospitality (or something) was, so I was quite sure they weren’t Proper things like what I was doing at The Sixth Form College—even though I already hated Psychology and thought it was pointless. I initially therefore assumed that I was cleverer than Julie; but gradually came to suspect that Julie was cleverer than me, because she knew how to lock up and open The Corner Shop, and how to make card payments on the phone—and how to use phones generally without having a minor Panic Attack; which despite years of practice I was still really struggling with.
Away from the tills was The Shop Floor, where restocking the shelves took up most of my time. When the restocking was had been completed for the night, the rest of the time could be spent “facing up” the stock; which meant not so much “coming to terms with” or “confronting” the stock as making sure as much as possible of the stock was at the front of the shelf, facing the Customers, thus using order to confer upon the stock the illusion of plentitude. It was the hobby of most Customers to inconveniently interrupt your facing up by removing a product you’d just faced up and taking it to the till to buy it—it was almost as if the very act of facing up provoked the Customer into making an immediate purchase; so whoever invented facing up must be very rich.
Julie’s friend Kim (not her real name) was also technically my Superior; they sometimes worked together on the same shifts as me, but Kim was never there as my sole Superior. (I’m not suggesting she couldn’t be trusted around me; this was probably just a coincidence.) Kim was very much the “bawdy tavern wench” type of staffer, and was thus favoured by the older male customers as much as she was disfavoured by the older female customers. I was never told how old she was, but I’m guessing somewhere between 15 and 50. When Kim was there, Julie would mostly talk to her; but Julie and I would get on well in Kim’s absence. If left alone with Kim, however, I didn’t really know what to say to her and felt that the feeling was mutual; so I’d tend to go and face up some stock. Kim hated The Shop Floor and the associated Manual Labour, so she was quite happy to be left behind the tills all night.
Tesco Girl was, it turned out, almost never on the same shifts as me—because she worked weekends, not evenings; so my initial enthusiasm for her prettiness gradually waned as numerous other possible candidates for my affection made themselves known at The Sixth Form College, and I eventually got a girlfriend who lived in a different bit of suburbia on another side of The Railway Town. I did get to know Tesco Girl a bit eventually though, and she was quite nice, if a bit horsey; by which I mean both that she was a bit too posh for me, and that she mainly talked about horses—one of which, specifically, she owned; but about which, generally, I knew and cared nothing. My main companion at The Corner Shop was to be Townie Richard, whose identity I will protect by hereafter referring to him as Townie Tim. Townie Tim wasn’t a townie; at least not according to him. I told him he was a townie because he chose to dress in sports clothing when not engaged in sporting activity—and because he lived in a town. He countered that he did not live in a town because he lived in a suburban culdesac. (Not The Suburban Culdesac; but one which was, judging by his description, quite similar to ours—except that it lacked direct access to a square mile of semi-commercial woodland.) Townie Tim told me that wearing sports clothing when not engaged in sporting activity was simply “normal” and that, furthermore, it was better than dressing like a “grunger”. I countered that I had no idea what a “grunger” was, so the likelihood that I dressed like one was minimal. He countered that he’d seen me walking to the bus-stop near his suburban culdesac, and that I’d definitely been dressed like a grunger. (Of course, we both wore our old school clothes while working in The Corner Shop.) I told him nobody even used the word “grunger” at my college because it was saaaaad; and, besides that, grunge music had shot itself in the head years ago and I hadn’t even liked it much in the first place because I’d preferred Britpop—which was by now also dead, because Menswear only released their second album in Japan. He said Britpop was rubbish but had I heard of The Stereophonics? I said he was rubbish, and that yes I had, and that they were rubbish as well. Townie Tim and I continued to try to put each other right in a mildly adversarial fashion for the rest of the shift—and for the rest of my time working at The Corner Shop. He was a year younger than me and had just begun studying for his A-levels in The Railway Town. I feared we had little in common culturally, though our present situations were so similar; but we eventually formed a superficial bond over a shared love of the TV show “I’m Alan Partridge”—from which he could, and did, quote every line of every episode at random intervals while restocking or facing up the shelves. We also bonded over a shared suspicion of people who affectionately described themselves as “mad!” but hadn’t bothered to seek medical help for their alleged condition. We did not bond over Tesco Girl, whose real name I learnt from him, and to whom he claimed prior rights (if she ever broke up with her long-term boyfriend) because he’d fancied her even before she started working at The Corner Shop, having seen her walking to the bus-stop near his suburban culdesac years ago.
A new Bossman arrived during my second week—transferred from somewhere else, and apparently replacing a Bosswoman who I’d barely noticed was still there because she’d never much left her office. The Bossman of The Corner Shop was middle-aged and weary-looking, wore ash-tray-thick glasses and short-sleeved shirts that were two sizes too big for him. He communicated exclusively via the medium of withering sarcasm—to the degree that, for example, if I asked him whether or not I should restock the dog-food, he’d reply with something along the lines of “No! Why bother? It’s not like I’m paying you or anything, is it?” or “No! Let’s just let all the dogs of [The neighbourhood surrounding The Corner Shop near The Suburban Culdesac] starve”. I’m not sure how this method of communication went down with his peers, but from my perspective as a teenager he very much had the air of A Warning From The Future: how I might end up one day, if I wasn’t careful. He definitely considered himself A Wit; but I knew that this wasn’t the shared perspective of the Members of Staff that I shared shifts with. He was harmless enough, I suppose; but we did our best never to give him a reason to emerge from his office.
Good Job or Bad Job?
The Corner Shop was not especially busy on the evenings of the weeknights when I worked there. I did a few weekend shifts, and liked these less; because even if Tesco Girl was there to look at, I didn’t get on with her as well as I did with Townie Tim or Julie. I much preferred the tills on weeknights, when I could nick till-rolls and stand there writing bits of poems or song lyrics while I was supposed to be working—imagining I was Eminem or something. The Shop Floor work was fine. Even enjoyable when Townie Tim was there to bicker with, or swap Partridge references with; and he usually was. Julie and Kim were both technically Superiors and probably got paid more; but like all the best Superiors they didn’t use their Superiority as a stick with which to beat us, so it was easy for us to respect it and it was no barrier to Solidarity.
Some of the regular Customers could be a bit of a drag, though most were fine. There was one woman I served almost every evening I worked there, who resolutely refused to speak a single word to me or return the smile I quite deliberately offered every time I handed over her change. I recall complaining about her to my mother; but my mother told me I shouldn’t be Judgmental, because I had no idea what was going on in her Personal Life. I considered asking her what was going on in her personal life next time I saw her, but decided that this would be Inappropriate. There was a ruddy-faced old man called Ron, with rusty hair and a bald patch. He staggered in with his cane every evening to buy a 75cl bottle of scotch whisky and to share with anybody who’d listen what little was left of his memories from the Second World War. And I do mean a bottle every evening; Julie and Kim who worked there more frequently than Townie Tim and me assured us that this was the case, and that Ron’s Alcoholism was widely known in the area. Ron was always very friendly and pleased to see us. He’d linger for a while, before and after he bought the whisky, and would pretend to be perusing the shelves for other things in order to find someone to converse with. He’d give anyone the time of day; but was happiest when talking to the girls or women—especially Kim, who would gladly humour him for as long as there was no queue at the tills. One evening when I was working, he came in much later—just before closing time—apparently forgetting he’d already been in once that day. He was so drunk he could barely walk, or talk, or breathe, and Kim and Julie had to gently but firmly guide him back outside. Julie called one of his neighbours to see that he was safely taken home.
That Job was always finite, Prospective Employer, as far as I was concerned. Of course everything is finite, so every Job is finite; and none of mine had yet lasted for as long as a year. But I knew with the coming summer that my A-levels would come to an end, and I’d want to be freed for the holiday season. After all: after said holidays I’d be off to university, and I’d probably never work in a shop—or certainly not The Corner Shop—again. The quiet evenings sometimes began to drag; but the Job always felt secure—even safe, and comfortable—and if there were no Customers to serve, there was always restocking to do, or poems to write. Productivity, of one kind or another, was constant; but the pace was gentle—and it suited me well. The Customers were rarely troublesome. And while Bossman could be a bit of a pillock, he hadn’t the power nor the determination to dent my Dignity; if he put me down in front of Julie or Kim—and he liked to put us boys down in front of the girls; that was one of his main hobbies—I’d get my own back by selling cigarettes to boys who I strongly suspected were too young to legally buy them, and feigning ignorance when he came to complain.
On the day I told Bossman I was leaving, and asked for a P45, he said “Finally. We can get some decent staff in!” And it felt good that I didn’t have to bother pretending to laugh. My memories of him are few, and he taught me nothing. But I’m grateful to Julie, who taught me how to properly collapse cardboard boxes; an invaluable skill that I’ve used a million times since, and which my wife—who never worked in a corner shop—has yet to master, and therefore probably never will. (She worked as a chambermaid, and insists I’ve never learnt to properly make a bed…) For the box-collapsing alone, The Corner Shop Job would have been a worthwhile experience; but The Corner Shop Job was, on balance, my best Job yet. I liked it so much that I’d even spent four hours of Christmas Day there: the Bossman—recently divorced, Kim told us—decided it would be convenient for the Customers if we were to open the shop on Christmas Day, instead of being at home with our families. I didn’t mind; I was paid extra, and almost nobody came to buy anything—even though we faced the place up to the rafters. Bossman, frustrated, ordered me to go outside and sweep the frost-flecked pavements clean; which I gleefully did with my headphones in, wearing my brand-new Matrix-style full-length leather jacket. I even lit a cigarette once he was safely back in his office. One of the best days at Work I ever had! I already knew by then that it was A Good Job, and so it remained to the last.
Concluding notes
Ron died toward the end of my tenure at The Corner Shop. I don’t know what of; but I think it’s safe to say it was something to do with the 75cl of scotch we sold him every night. For the majority of the time I was there, I was too young to be allowed to sell alcohol without Julie or Kim bleeping it through with a fob. But we all sold him whisky at one point or another (except, to be fair, Townie Tim). Everyone knew he was an Alcoholic, and we’d talked about how uncomfortable the situation was. But the locals said he’d no family left; they’d tried to intervene—to warn him that if he didn’t stop drinking… I’d no idea what The Law said about such matters. But Bossman was much more concerned by our selling cigarettes to teenagers than he was by our fuelling the lethal whisky-addiction of an old soldier. I have no answers to any of the questions this matter raises, Prospective Employer. We all make choices in life, and must thereafter live with them—or die.
We had a sort of send-off when I left. Four of us went and sat on a bench in a park, and someone (not me) brought some tequila and a bottle of Taboo. Julie had to go home early because she had some college work to do, leaving the unlikely trio of Townie Tim and Tesco Girl and me. We drank together while the sun went down behind the various suburban culdesacs; and, at some point, once our mutual drunkenness had reached a critical mass, Tesco Girl divulged an unsolicited anecdote concerning a cucumber she’d once known—in the… erm… King James sense. I can’t recall if the fruit was sourced from the stock at The Corner Shop, or to what end the information was offered, but Townie Tim took the story as a sign that it was finally time to declare his love; for which Tesco Girl wasn’t quite ungrateful, but was not quite grateful either. My last memory of that night is of running up the road to “give [them] some space” (in which I wasn’t being sick) and of them both running after me: him shouting again and again that he loved her, and her shouting back at him to go home because he was drunk. We all went home in the end; it was a school night, after all.
Once, I was asked to go and work for a couple of days at another branch of The Corner Shop, halfway between our part of suburbia and The Railway Town, because they were severely understaffed. With nobody there that I knew, slightly different tills, and a completely different shop-floor layout, this brief and innocuous episode had the exact same feeling of semi-familiarity and underlying anxiety that you get in a vivid nightmare. Or maybe, Prospective Employer, it really was a nightmare. We may never know...
[Next chapter.]
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