A Little Hazelnutty

In my last post, when I said "That's a blog for another time", this is that one. Another time has arrived. Over the the past couple of years, I've been hearing the same commentary on the labor market from everybody & their brother. I've even said it myself a few times. "Nobody wants to work". That's an inaccurate statement. It's no secret that the service industry is suffering the most. Yeah, we've heard about fields like plumbing, where not enough people are pursuing careers to replace the professionals that are retiring. I think we could all agree, though, that you are most aware of the "labor shortage" when you are waiting in line. Whether that's at the grocery store, the coffee shop, the bank, or the fast food drive-thru. Nobody wants to work... for customers. It is true, that in March of 2020, a lot of people took time off from work because they were afraid, and some of those people found ways to stay home for a while c

I haven't written for a very long time... years, actually, but I want to do it more, so here we go.   I don't want to talk about the policies surrounding the virus, there's plenty of people doing that. I just want to share a bit about what it has been like to work at a grocery store during this time. In 2010, when I was 20 years old, I was hired as a cashier at Hannaford. During my first winter working there, I drove to work in a few snowstorms. One was nasty enough that business was pretty slow when I got there. I had been there maybe an hour or so, when a manager asked me if I would like to go home. Obviously, I said "no", after going through the trouble of getting to work in the storm, it seemed foolish to only work for an hour. I was given the task of doing some deep cleaning, since there was nothing else for me to do on such a slow day. I asked "Why doesn't the store just close on days like this? It's so slow that people are looking for things to