9:30 PM, need a drink, run up to the corner gas station, bring drink to register, say "hey," the cashier is behind the counter looking down counting money...for a long minute...without acknowledging me.
me: what time do you all close? (thinking it must be very soon if he's already counting)
him: 10:45
me: hmmmm...that's kinda random time...
him: yeah it's so we can close up and have everything ready and can get out of here at 11.
me: what about the people who see your lights on at 10:35 and figure you must be open til 11 and come try to buy something at 10:50?
him: (blank stare)
Monday, June 09, 2008
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8 comments:
was the cashier young?
i used to pull that same thing in high school when i worked at the golf course. i would close everything down at a quarter til so i could get out of there and do whatever high school kids in jenks, oklahoma do.
probably drink beer in a field somewhere.
same story. in high school we used to initiate the count well before close so that we could leave as early as possible (so that we could go drink beer in parking lots of local parks or the athetic fields behind some elementary school or jr. high named after a tree or some former secretary of state or whatnot--childhood appears universal.
i recall that we left some kind of cushion to accommodate late sales and didn't run the register tape until the store actually closed.
that appears the gap in the business model of the local gas 'n sip
if a customer asked you what time do you close would you say quarter til or the actual time? i snuck out early of everything ive ever done. wine coolers in parking lots, and this was before cell phones so you weren't sure who was where and where the cops were and things got dicey at fields close to two different high schools but all in all it worked out.
we closed when the mall closed, but it didn't stop us from aggressively vacuuming around the feet of late shoppers as a deterrent to last minute sales.
it was a golf course...as long as i kept giving the golfers beer they were happy. we would usually give it to them for free so we could close the doors early, close down the register and get the heck out of dodge. who wouldn't be happy with free beer.
we had no adult supervision. i don't think they let teenagers close down the clubhouse anymore. it was good while it lasted.
Wow... four is not that large of a sample size, but I think we've proved that it is universal...
At Waldbaum's we would lock the in-door about an hour before closing - which certainly decreased the number of customers coming into the store. There were always those persistent shoppers who knew what we were up to, and came in the out-door.
While the door was locked, 4-packs of Bartles & Jaymes or Zima were slipped through the hole in the floor near where the truck pulled up to the backroom... for eventual consumption in a parking lot of an athletic field or school named after a tree or Secretary of State.
I remember in waldbaums replacing all the cans in a case of soda with cans of beer--right in the aisle--then purchasing the case of "soda" good times. probably in the hour before close after entering through the exit.
replacing the soda cans is brilliant! i used to 'chalk' id's with colored pencils. change 1976 to 70. 77 to 72. 75 to 72.
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