Adventures in corporate mergers

As I've mentioned before, I work at a convenience store. It's a pretty big chain, although nobody outside the midwest will probably have heard of it, unless you've watched the first Jackass movie.

Our company recently bought out another local convenience store chain. People got pissy. They liked the local chain because it was local. And it had a really big selection of food -- stuffed crust pizzas and chicken and sandwiches.... Not the pre-packaged microwavable kind, actual fresh food. Sounds great and all, I know. But first of all, it's not like big bad corporate giant swooped in and forced ma and pa convenience store owner out of business. This is a local chain with something like 40 stores whose owner approached our company and wanted to sell. So the pissy people can shove it.

Also, the pissy people should get a look behind the scenes of their beloved Cody's. The stores were fucking filthy. Kourt and I stopped by one a week or two ago and were disgusted. So it was really no surprise to me that last night when I arrived for my first night of "shadowing" at a newly converted store, the second shift staff had stories of uncovering little piles of dead bugs and such.

When I arrived, things were much cleaner. All the machines had been replaced, the store completely rebranded, and most everything in its place. There was still a great deal of confusion and chaos -- taking over and transitioning this many stores is, of course, going to come with some confusion. We didn't know the passcode for the drop safe, we had to trial-and-error our way into guessing the one and only login code for the registers, and we couldn't find half the things that we knew were supposed to be in the store.

Plus, when the transition team set the store up, they just shoved everything they couldn't find space for or didn't have time to put away into the very, very tiny back room.

(Sorry for the pic quality -- I need to clean the lens on my camera phone.)

That's the back room. All of it. And that pile of crap in the middle -- that's AFTER we started finding space for it all.

If that had been at a store as busy as mine, I'd have been a little pissed off to have to deal with it all. This store, however, is in the middle of fucking nowhere. Seriously, when I went outside to have a smoke I could hear wild animals in the distance. We saw five customers all night. Five. That half hour it took us to figure out how to log onto the register? Not a soul came onto the lot.

Anyway, my two trainees and I started poking through the big pile of crap and found interesting stuff. Outdated stuff. This pic is of the expiration date on a soda bib. Do you know how long it takes for soda syrup to expire?

Neither do I.

We've never, ever, had a soda bib expire.

I heard that before we got there, they pulled several totes full of expired chips and candy off the shelves. Isn't that comforting, Cody's fans? You've been buying stale chips for months and months now. Some of it since last June. How's that for a great convenience store experience, huh?

Not that everything K&G has done with the place seems like the greatest idea, either. Like this:

Now, I know I work in the 'hood and this store is in BFE, but no locked liquor cases? Really?

Oh, well. I guess if you only see five customers a night, it's pretty easy to keep an eye on people.

Anyway, since all the machines and fixtures were brand new and sparkling clean, and nobody came in to mess up our freshly scrubbed bathrooms, floors, or countertops, the three of us were left with pretty much nothing to do but find spots for all the stuff that had been piled in the back room that WASN'T out of date. We found new displays that hadn't been put together and stocked, squeezed the forty billion boxes of drink cups onto the available shelf space, and distributed some of the stuff out onto the shelves. When all was said and done, we had accomplished this:

I know it doesn't look all that much better, but really, that's all the floor space available in that room. All the backstock fits on the shelf, and once they get the outdated product out of there it should be a workable workspace.

I go back tonight for another epically boring eight hours of thumb-twiddling. I'll probably teach them how to clean the coffee pots and soda nozzles, write up some instruction sheets for future reference, and then maybe go out front and see how many coyotes I can get to howl at 2am.