Rose Thorne(She/Her)

How about instead of coming in and being a dick in someone’s thread, you post things to encourage what you’re looking for?

No, it must just be easier to smell your own shit in the garden than finding a toilet.

Found a package of ground beef randomly hidden in the very back of the milk cooler. Thankfully kept fairly cool, and still in date, but a customer had stuck it there because he wanted to come back later. He came back the next day and tried to file a complaint because it wasn’t there.

Fish left in the bathroom. Like, straight up a pack of salmon fillets, just left there on the top of the toilet tank. Our best guess was that someone wanted to steal it, but either couldn’t fit it or got spooked and just abandoned it. It was in a far corner, barely used bathroom, too.

Half eaten fruit or candy thats been shoved to the back of a low shelf. You know a kid did it, there’s massive mess back there, and depending on what aisle they hid it in, it might have been there for a couple days to a week. Once found a bell pepper some kid had chomped into.

This is more just “general trash”, but still not uncommon if your store has a hotbar: Stolen food containers. People grab their dinner, eat it throughout the store, and then just put the trash wherever. If you’re lucky, they leave it somewhere obvious. If you’re unlucky, you find an open container of half-eaten rotisserie chicken shoved into a vent after they turned the heat on for the winter. Going past the deli in my store has triggered minor PTSD at times. That smell… Just… Hot rot. That’s the only way to describe it. Rotting garbage, oven warmed.

You can and will find terrifying things working in grocery.

I once found a pack of beef jerky that had become 90% mold. It was tucked all the way towards the back of the shelves, partially shoved into the crack between two of them. We had no clue how long it had been sitting back there, because jerky rarely needed a full teardown.

Leaving things they decided they don’t want just wherever in a store. It’s annoying as a customer, because now I have to dig through their mess to get the product I actually wanted, and even moreso as an employee.

At least put it back in the right department. The underpaid employees who have been there since before the store opened for the day really don’t want to have to play the game of “How long has this ground beef been sitting in a produce basket, and how much product did we just lose?”

For me, the biggest first step was recognizing my habits in letting it start and pushing myself to not let it. I had to look at my own habits, learn to recognize when they were starting, and actually push myself to get up and do.

With that last bit, though, came the why I was struggling to do in the first place. Sometimes it can be that it’s something we don’t enjoy, and with that, it helped to remind myself that just getting it done meant it was over with. I can get back to whatever comfort I was in when it’s done, and make myself do it.

Sometimes it’s more, though. My depression and anxiety heavily fed into my lack of motivation and energy, and even the perfectionism I struggled with was fueled by anxiety that I’d somehow get it wrong.

That took getting help, medication, and changing a lot of my own thought process. Making a schedule definitely helped me with feeling like I wasn’t getting done “on time” or early enough. If I know something takes me 30 minutes, I schedule it out for 45 so if I take longer, I’m still not “behind”, and if I get done quicker, hey, I got some free time!

Learning to give myself some slack really helped, too. I had to tell myself it was okay if everything wasn’t perfect, if something came up, because we can’t plan for everything. The only thing we can do is try. Sometimes we give it our all, but something outside of our control goes wrong.

Learn to recognize and break negative thought processes. Don’t ignore mistakes or accidents, and don’t just bottle up negative emotion, but recognize when the thoughts are becoming a block.

Find what motivates you. Sometimes it’s easier to get through the rough when you know there’s something worth it at the end.