High School: Jensen’s Market

After leaving the Liquor Cabinet, I decided to see if Jensen’s Market was hiring. This market was the largest store on the mountain at the time - it was the only supermarket within thirty miles. If you wanted fresh foods, you either had to shop there or make the long trip to San Bernardino.

The week after the Liquor Cabinet closed its doors, I walked into Jensen’s and asked if there were any positions available. I knew they were a stickler about dress codes, so I took care to look nice. I wore a nice pair of pants, a pressed white shirt and a tie. I also cut my hair and shaved off my beard, although I left my mustache.

I was directed into a small office next to the dairy department. I tentatively pushed my head in and asked if this was where I was to be interviewed. A short, thin man was standing at a desk, and he said I could come in, this was the right place.

I don’t have any memories from that interview, but it must have gone well because I was hired immediately. My job was to haul milk, eggs and other dairy products into the cooler, to make sure that the display case was always full, and to check the dates on the various products to be sure they were fresh.

I performed those tasks for several months, working for someone else who actually managed the dairy. I started work early in the morning, around 5:00 a.m., so that the products could be counted, stored and displayed before the store opened at 9:00.

One day I came to work and noticed that the dairy manager was not in. This was unusual, because he was a fanatic about getting to work on time. When Mike arrived a couple of hours later, he told me that the dairy manager had been fired. Within a couple of weeks after that event, I was promoted to dairy manager. Since no one was hired to fill the position that I had vacated, this meant I had to perform the duties of two positions at the same time.

My new duties included ordering new product, dumping the old product and keeping records of sales so that I could predict what to order in the future. I remained in this position for well over a year and a half (I worked at Jensen’s for over two years) until I left the job for greener pastures.

I soon became very good at predicting the quantities of milk, eggs and cheese that would be sold during the next week. Mike was thrilled when I began to cut my orders very close - so close that there would be one row of milk left when the new shipment arrived. This meant we almost never threw out any old product, thus increasing the profit margin of the dairy department tremendously.

I did make mistakes occasionally, although they usually were not my fault. For example, one Christmas, I faithfully ordered 10% more than was ordered the Christmas before. Unfortunately for me, it snowed extremely heavily during the week before, thus preventing people from getting to the store to do any shopping. Because of this error, I had to throw away almost 200 cases of milk (that’s 1,200 gallons) as well as a corresponding amount of yogurt, cheese and other products. Fortunately, everyone in the store had over ordered, so I wasn’t fired or reprimanded. Of course, I compounded the error by ordering extra short the following week, not realizing that people now needed more milk products than usual. So that time I ran out of milk long before the week was over. Fortunately, I called our supplier and got a special shipment delivered so that we were not out of milk for the entire week.

When the cheese manager was fired, Mike decided I was competent enough to handle both the dairy department and the cheese department. He didn’t give me a raise of change my salary, however, he simply neglected to hire someone else for the position.

Unloading a large cheese order is a hell of a lot of work. It’s a different kind of work that hauling in the milk, which takes lots of strength and time. The boxes of cheese are delivered in large boxes, which must be transferred to the shelf. Since the cheese arrived in hundreds of boxes, it was very time consuming to open each box, price each item, and put it on the proper place on the shelf. This must be done quickly, as the cheese was not supposed to be outside for very long.

Because I didn’t have much help, the cheese would sometimes remain outside on the dock for an entire day. Occasionally, on cold days, it might remain out there for as long as a week before I could get it transferred to the shelf or to the cheese cooler. On more than one occasion, the cheese actually got warm before I had a chance to store it away. Fortunately, the health department never came around when this happened.