Last summer, before moving to Kent for school, I made the mistake of quitting my job back home before finding another one. Kent is (obviously) a college town, there are over 20,000 students and usually 50-100 places in the area hiring at any given time, plus I can't drive so I was limited to places within a reasonable walking distance. Neeedless to say, it took me a while to find work.
About three months ago, my friends suggested that I apply for Marc's. Marc's, if you're not aware, is a Northeast Ohio-based grocery chain. I had been to Marc's a couple times beforehand. It wasn't my grocery store of choice, because Walmart tends to have similar prices and better quality food (Marc's is known for having shitty produce/meats, but I'll get into that later), but I actually sort of loved it the few times I went there as a customer.
Marc's is weird as fuck. The stores (no matter how far back they date) all look like they haven't been remodeled since the 90s (besides some modern-looking signage but nobody cares about that unless they're a raging autist like me), there's tons of quirky decorations (like rocking horses in the frozen aisle and model trains hanging on the ceiling), their closeout aisles have the most useless bullshit ever for 200% discount prices, and their playlist can go from Ed Sheeran to 1930s jazz standards to Depeche Mode one after another. These factors really scratched an itch I had for an atmosphereically interesting place to work, and after hearing an Elvis Costello song over the loudspeaker one day while shopping for white people taco night supplies, I decided to listen to my friends and apply.
Finn picked up an application for me and I filled it out and turned it in. I didn't hear from them for weeks. At this point I was pulling from the $5,000 of graduation money I was keeping in the credit union just to buy groceries, so I really didn't have time to be anxious over phone calls. I just decided to call and ask for an interview myself, which they accepted. A couple days later, I went into that interview (that I felt I was pretty confident in because I'd interviewed a billion times over the previous 6 months and was used to the questions), and to my complete and utter amazement, was hired on the spot. Finally, my job search was over!
My orientation was that next week. I filled out about 40 forms and shown a basic customer service training video and DIY mass shooting awareness video, clearly shot at another location with real employees. (I wasn't shown the infamous anti-union video, but more on that later.) While I was watching my videos, a couple teenage employees sat down in the break room at the other end of the table. They'd occasionally look up at me, seemingly in annoyance. They began gossipping about another new hire, who according to them (albiet phrased less gracefully) was mentally disabled. The scheduling manager would come in periodically to check on me and make snarky comments at them. Finally, when I finished watching, I met my manager in the office to get properly signed on. Suddenly, an older woman came in, seemingly panicked.
"[scheduling manager name]," she said, "I think [other employee] is hurt because he got cut on a carboard box and he's bleeding but he keeps saying he's fine but he needed a bandage-"
I think I just pulled my best "millennial who thinks they're in The Office" face at my manager while she tried to calm her down.
Maybe 5 minutes later, one of the teenagers from the break room came in and started gossipping about another (presumabley teenage) employee, and to my shock, my manager began gossipping back, saying things along the lines of "Yeah, fuck [name of probable teenager]" and talking about how annoying she found him.
Soon enough, I was given my uniform and signed a few more forms, ensuring that I was now an offcial Marc's employee. On my way back to my hometown (I bounced back and forth quite a lot over spring break), I told my dad "I think I may have just joined the most dysfunctional workplace ever".
A couple days later, I came back for my first training shift. It was...okay. My biggest gripe was that I was being "trained" by an employee who looked to be about 16 years old and clearly didn't want to be there, so my instructions were sparse. I was also thrown off a bit by the fact that it didn't seem like the managers even knew I worked there. While viewing my schedule, I noticed