The store is becoming a beast. A nice new young manager has arrived in the wine department, and he has determined to make the 40,000 square foot space look as spectacular as the corporate office wants it to look. That means huge displays of cases of wine everywhere, “endcaps” they are called, and lots of bottles exposed, both for ease of shopping and for the gleam of acres of glass. Show your glass is the home office advice. They love him. He ordered in one thousand new cases of wine for his first day on the job. “You can’t sell from an empty basket,” perhaps someone told him encouragingly. He really is very nice. Lots of tattoos and piercings.
What is unfortunate is that two staff have left or will leave in the next week or two. Each one has his reasons. The challenge becomes, who will lift all this stuff? In the liquor industry, or maybe retail in general, to “lift” is to hoist and carry heavy objects as part of your stock day. To use it in a sentence: he’s knowledgeable but he doesn’t want to do the lifting. Or, these middle aged women are great with customers, but they can’t lift.
I surely can’t, not like I used to. And even then I only lifted like a forty-year-old. I half-jokingly whine about it. “Do you people have any idea how old I am? And my shoulder is not in the best of shape, either. All this repetitive pulling on the two-wheeler ….” A case of wine is about 35 pounds, that is, 12 bottles of 750 ml each, or nine liters of liquid plus glass. A case of Franzia boxed wine is four boxes of 5 liters each, twenty liters plus the negligible weight of cardboard. A case of Carlo Rossi plonk is four 4-liter bottles, plus glass. The bulk of what a television set used to be.
Often I imagine hosting some sort of Ted talk about women in the wine industry. I see myself strutting about in heels and a headset and trousers. On the stage is an oversized scale, just like in statues of Justice blind. To demonstrate my point — which really wouldn't be a point, just chattering temporary bitchy rage — I would seat a small delicate woman in one pan of the scale. Let’s say she’s my friend Mudgeon, who might weigh a hundred pounds, and loves and knows wine. Then on the other pan of Justice’ scale I would (cause two men to) throw in succession some cases of wine. Maybe a Rossi, maybe a Franzia, maybe something obnoxiously heavily packaged, but ordinary. “Juggernaut” comes to mind. Or a case of some of the very superb and glorious Napa offerings — and it’s always Napa, the French and the Italians don't need to prove their value by glassweight — a bottle alone of which would start to tip the scale to outweighing Mudgeon.
And in my bitchy imaginary Ted talk I imagine myself saying: “See? This might be why, dear ladies and gentlemen, you don’t see too many women in the wine industry. Oh, your good looking young things becoming sommeliers and winemaker’s daughters, sure. They pose in the magazine sunlight in a vineyard with gleaming long hair and plain white shirts, and they love the land and the grapes’ expression. But when the juice gets itself bottled and sold and on the receiving dock of Big Box Booze in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania, I can tell you. Fairly well-paid union truck drivers drop it, eight to ten cases on a dolly at one time. They drop it, so to speak, widthwise or transversely. In order to scoop it back up efficiently you have to be able to scoop eight or ten cases too. Then they take off for their next stop. Very often the retail employees faced with putting it on the shelves are divorcees in their fifties who cherry-pick three cases at a time — straight on, not transversely, so to speak — place them inefficiently one at a time on a wheeler and head out to the sales floor. One overworked young man, the new wine manager, perhaps? — ‘scoops’ the remaining eight and follows them. (To “scoop” is to use the blade of a two-wheeler to lift up a stack of product from the floor and propel it elsewhere.)
“So,” still in my Ted talk, “you might want to consider how badly you really want to sell your wine. If I could wave a magic wand I might create a wine shop where all cases must be 6-packs only, or where if a bottle weighed above a certain poundage, the corporate buyer would simply say to the winery representative, ‘I’m so sorry. We are woman-friendly’ ….”
But of course I am just being bitchy and silly. Don’t get me wrong, I understand that the economics of how things have to be done, what is cost effective and what is not, are all more vital considerations than what the middle aged lady working retail liquor can handle until her other shoulder wears out. It’s like when you are driving and you pass a construction site on the highway. The woman “construction worker” is always standing by the side of the road, holding the sign that says Slow and Stop. The men are working, because you can’t pass a moral law to order digging to be easier and asphalt to be less heavy, for her sake. It’s just that I have a ways to go before retirement, if it ever comes. And it kind of seems like a race with the other shoulder.
And those two co-workers have quit this week alone. Even if this “gig” is still right for you, cost effective and whatnot, other people moving on makes you feel like you should move forward, too.