gary brolsma tank n spank

[PhantomCatClock]

You're American right? What's it like working in an grocery story over there? Is it anything at all like Clerks? Over here grocery stores are all loud, overlit and kind of cheap (not in terms of products sold, but in store fixtures etc. lots of plastic and those gross shelves made out of thin, shiny metal bars) and all are staffed entirely by fifteen-year-olds. Although "loud and overlit" is probably an accurate description of the American way, there's just something slightly off about ours, like an uncanny valley bad copy. I'm only familiar with Manhattan grocery stores, like Duane Reade, which I doubt are an accurate representation of a grocery store in an average American town. Looking at photographs of store interiors I'm starting to wonder if I haven't romanticized my whole mental image, based on depictions in movies or whatever. Although, looking at stills from like The Big Lebowski and Punch Drunk Love they are all just as bright and tacky, so I have no idea where I got it from. I'm also starting to wonder why I'm overthinking grocery stores.

There is a store in town that's like that. They're our only real competitor in this town and uh, it's not really a competition.  They had shit that expired in like 2014 when I last went. (I go there for the great Chinese food which, now that I've put these last two thoughts right next to each other, might not be a great idea.) Our store can be pretty loud for basically the first two weeks of a month, Sundays (but not Fridays for some weird reason), and near holidays, but it's a big unloving warehouse store so it's so badly lit even I can function there. And our steels, mmm. Our shelves are so manly and solid that we just call them steels, so I'm glad you rolled the 1% chance to mention that


ordinarily I wouldn't be proud of a fucking shelf but we did just get the store remodeled and the novelty hasn't worn off, yet



never saw Clerks so I'm going to say it's 100% accurate. OH but we have one person who isn't 18. Off the top of my head, there's him, five or six people under 21, four people with white hair, and maybe forty others who are just "adults" of various ages. We have a union, though, so kids aren't exactly excited for the prospect of paying to get twenty hours a week at minimum wage, but it's nice for people who stick around.







But then again, the stores you mentioned are like large convenience stores or small grocery stores in small towns. My store's part of a company made to compete with another company that went bankrupt because mine did so well, then got bought out by mine, but the previously-bankrupt one was put in charge because it was easier to manage by our mutual PARENT company, an S&P 500 that's the third-largest retailer in the world (not just grocery). Our store might barely be making $60k-95k on a good day in a city with 70,000 people, but BY GOD does daddy give us a good building to operate in.















So yes, we exceed the expectations you explicitly listed. It's just gross and shitty in every other way you're assumed.

[PhantomCatClock]

I had to google how big my town's population was and what the hell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus_Ranch


why does this have its own wikipedia article?





It's just a smelly broken inn on the highway. I only ever notice it because the sign is rust-melted and it looks like it says Fagus Ranch.

[PhantomCatClock]

@Grey's latest: five or six people got jobs as the people who make these online want ads and they're abusing their power for their own job security and ruining the world's economy for single young adults


@Rob: no, spend all day downloading and deleting World of Warcraft just to make Blizzard's servers run a tiny bit slower.

[RobClock]

I done did it anyways.

It's much easier to prune huge amounts of emails on Yahoo than it is in Outlook because when you click the little checkbox at the top to 'select all' on Outlook it only selects the 25 or so emails that are currently visible on screen, but on Yahoo it selects every email thats been loaded in. So if you scroll to the very bottom of your inbox and hit that checkbox, it will select all 12,000 emails you've got in there.

Unrelated but my internet has been running slow as shit for the last two or three days and I'm worrying that my ISP may have capped me.

[GreyClock]

post

That's part of the appeal I think, the sturdy shelves etc. You know, the craftsmanship. I went to a thrift store in New York and there was a lot of really great stuff in there, old, but well-made and solid. Made out of quality materials like cast iron and thick, clean wood. If you go to a thrift store here it's all dinged-up IKEA furniture, made out of fake wood as thin as cardboard, lamps made out of cheap, hard plastics and decorative items so flimsy and tacky you wouldn't find them in a trailer park. Like a smelly, waterstained wicker vase or an ugly ceramic garden gnome. And not fun ugly, like "ha ha this is something a serial killer would have in his house," but just really, really gross and kind of sad. Like who designed this piece of shit? Who manufactured it? Who picked it out and paid money for it in a store? Who had it in his or her home? Who brought it to a thrift store instead of just throwing it in the garbage? Why didn't the thrift store employee reject it, what did he or she see in it? Is someone ever going to buy it? What's his or her problem? Etc.

Anyway, forty employees, that's some store... I think. Actually, I'm not exactly sure how many people work at my various local supermarkets.

[PhantomCatClock]

It has to be more than forty, because our weekly schedule thingy has six or eight pages. I'll count next time I'm actually work WHICH ISN'T UNTIL THURSDAY WOOOOOOO and there's definitely more than ten per page, but it doesn't feel like that many because I definitely know all of the afternoon folk and some of the night folk

[RobClock]

[RobClock]

[RobClock]

going slightly loopy sitting at home

[VCRClock]

What's it like working in an grocery story over there? Is it anything at all like Clerks?

The Big Lebowski's portrayal of a regular-ass grocery store is pretty accurate. The Clerks store is more like a gas station convenience store without the gas station. Nobody's there to buy a week's groceries. An actual grocery store has better prices and fewer expired items, so there's probably a lot of foot traffic and people just there for alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, salt and lotto tickets. I'd tell you what working inside a grocery store was like but I was the guy out there returning shopping carts for people who couldn't be arsed.

I'm currently looking through the wanted ads and I want to say a thing or two about the current job market. It's absolutely dismal, the jobs are all so uninteresting and inapplicable and the qualities they're looking for in an applicant are so formulaic and grating, like: "

seeking [unappealing activity] ninjas with a rockstar attitude

Also some of the requirements are insanely specific. This is an actual ad I saw: "Wanted: degree as a secretary from a vocational school and fluency in Dutch, English, German and Italian."

seeking a full stack web developer with expertise in the adobe creative suite (photoshop, indesign, after effects)

That's part of the appeal I think, the sturdy shelves etc. You know, the craftsmanship. I went to a thrift store in New York and there was a lot of really great stuff in there, old, but well-made and solid. Made out of quality materials like cast iron and thick, clean wood. If you go to a thrift store here it's all dinged-up IKEA furniture, made out of fake wood as thin as cardboard, lamps made out of cheap, hard plastics and decorative items so flimsy and tacky you wouldn't find them in a trailer park.

New York City is maybe not a representative area for thrift stores. There's plenty of secondhand IKEA and "not eligible for irony" ugly shit in thrift stores in general, but arguably people who live close enough to New York to donate to New York area charities were making enough money to buy items in line with their New York lifestyle, so some of our ugly bullshit is designer ugly bullshit. When I imagine a person dying in New York and leaving possessions in their wake, I think of an elderly individual (and their associated hoard of old junk) living in an extremely valuable apartment that somebody is desperate to rent to someone willing to pay an arm and a leg to get it. I've got a distinct memory of finding what appeared to be the entire contents of some old lady's Manhattan apartment in a dumpster on the street, but I guess some people are considerate enough to donate, if making decisions or having an estate sale too much of a hassle. But then "thrift" is a misnomer when applied to some thrift stores in major cities. I think the most interesting stuff is likely to be found in stores located where nobody has enough taste to buy it. I always had better luck in the suburbs, and believed New York City thrift stores to generally be picked clean of quality items in good condition as soon as they arrived.

Let me tell you about my hobbies

[zl]

Let me tell you about my hobbies

go on

[RenegadeClock]

I think the most interesting stuff is likely to be found in stores located where nobody has enough taste to buy it.

Estate sales are pretty great too. You might have to dig through a bunch of crappy old people stuff, but there are usually some gems in there. The things people wouldn't part with until death.

[PhantomCatClock]

Can't wait until Renegade's estate sale. It's going to be the ultimate evolution of estate sales

[GreyClock]

The Big Lebowski's portrayal of a regular-ass grocery store is pretty accurate. The Clerks store is more like a gas station convenience store without the gas station. Nobody's there to buy a week's groceries. An actual grocery store has better prices and fewer expired items, so there's probably a lot of foot traffic and people just there for alcohol, cigarettes, sugar, salt and lotto tickets. I'd tell you what working inside a grocery store was like but I was the guy out there returning shopping carts for people who couldn't be arsed.

The reference to Clerks was more in terms of work atmosphere. PhantomCat mentioned the walk-around-and-look-busy and sorry-we're-out departments. I worked in a grocery store when I was fifteen and there was none of that. We only had the stock-shelves-at-breakneck-speed-while-being-ridden-by-a-40-something-store-manager-who-took-his-job-way-too-seriously department. Now I know no two stores are alike etc. but I only have to walk into a random supermarket over here and that's still the general vibe I get. Then again, that's nothing compared to say, working at Walmart from what I understand.

seeking a full stack web developer with expertise in the adobe creative suite (photoshop, indesign, after effects)

Combine the two to create the elite hacker, polyglot, karate master, well-read history & science buff, not-been-alive-long-enough-to-master-even-half-this-shit trope.

Another funny one I saw was from some medium town, bush-league cultural institution who were looking for someone with a broad range of major international players (I'm talking relevant government branches, universities etc.) in his or her personal network. a) Why would someone that connected be interested in working for peanuts at your shitty institution? And b) what the fuck is your endgame here? Do you think that this new hire will call up Stanford and they are going to come running to set up a research program into the history of the collected letters of Count Bumfuck the Fourth?

New York City is maybe not a representative area for thrift stores. There's plenty of secondhand IKEA and "not eligible for irony" ugly shit in thrift stores in general, but arguably people who live close enough to New York to donate to New York area charities were making enough money to buy items in line with their New York lifestyle, so some of our ugly bullshit is designer ugly bullshit. When I imagine a person dying in New York and leaving possessions in their wake, I think of an elderly individual (and their associated hoard of old junk) living in an extremely valuable apartment that somebody is desperate to rent to someone willing to pay an arm and a leg to get it. I've got a distinct memory of finding what appeared to be the entire contents of some old lady's Manhattan apartment in a dumpster on the street, but I guess some people are considerate enough to donate, if making decisions or having an estate sale too much of a hassle. But then "thrift" is a misnomer when applied to some thrift stores in major cities. I think the most interesting stuff is likely to be found in stores located where nobody has enough taste to buy it. I always had better luck in the suburbs, and believed New York City thrift stores to generally be picked clean of quality items in good condition as soon as they arrived.

Yeah, I guess I'm basing all this on my rather limited experiences. Meaning one actual visit and a handful of episodes from dumb television shows like Storage Wars and American Pickers. That said, I'm maintaining there is an inherent quality to a lot of American (old) shit. And seeing as there's so many of you, there's a lot more hoarders, and a lot more items actually out there in general.

Let me tell you about my hobbies

Yes.

[Luwano]

Lovely work on how those achenes warp around his body.

[RobClock]

Lovely work on how those achenes warp around his body.

Thanks! I did my best to keep it from looking like a copy-pasted grid

[RenegadeClock]

Can't wait until Renegade's estate sale. It's going to be the ultimate evolution of estate sales

So you can't wait for me to die? Hope you like fishing gear.

[VCRClock]

Yeah, I guess I'm basing all this on my rather limited experiences. Meaning one actual visit and a handful of episodes from dumb television shows like Storage Wars and American Pickers. That said, I'm maintaining there is an inherent quality to a lot of American (old) shit. And seeing as there's so many of you, there's a lot more hoarders, and a lot more items actually out there in general.

I've never watched Storage Wars, and I've maybe incidentally seen some American Pickers, but from time to time I think about becoming the kind of person who buys stuff out of other people's storage units.

I love visiting used goods stores run by people who can't bear to let stuff go, though those people don't usually price shit to sell. (I know neither of us really know what we're looking at, but you're going to try to charge me $7 for a 50 cent record and let me have Bad Bascomb for a buck? Two dollars each for these children's 45s I was going to take a chance on? Other places give me a break when I clear out a huge stack of probable bullshit! I sure hope another buyer comes along!) It's much more fun to pull records and crumpled sleeves out of collapsing bookshelves, or stacked cardboard boxes with only three sides intact, than it is to show up somewhere and have everything neatly laid out in sunlit milk crates. Even if it's 2017 and there isn't a good record in either store. My favorite kind of store is "textbook fire hazard."

When I see pictures of somebody's 50-year hoard of garbage, I'm excited about the things potentially in that hoard of garbage that probably should have been thrown out. It is a small misery of mine that if I were ever put in charge of a warehouse, no one would ever find any cool deadstock in it.

[BilliardBall10]

[abour american grocery stores]And our steels, mmm. Our shelves are so manly and solid that we just call them steels, so I'm glad you rolled the 1% chance to mention that

ordinarily I wouldn't be proud of a fucking shelf but we did just get the store remodeled and the novelty hasn't worn off, yet

So yes, we exceed the expectations you explicitly listed. It's just gross and shitty in every other way you're assumed.

i dont know about you, but they have excellent steel shaves in my (local) grocery store as well. (store A)
they also have some nice wooden stands, and they are made from nice, sturdy planks, which are forming a large row of stands, where the producers are placing their products on. also the area is over-lit and (sometimes)very loud.

as for an other grocery story that i visit (store B), it has some cool wooden shelves and some nice wooden stands, while the products are all neatly placed on plastic(or paper) boxes on top of the aforementioned wooden stands.
other stands are made from steel as well, so they are obviously more impressive.
this place has also an over-lit area, yet its not as loud as the other store.(at all, its actually a pretty quiet place, even when many people are shopping in there. it has a good service, so few people will ever shout in there, if at all).

obviously, grocery store B is my favorite, even if grocery store A is larger, with more variety and with alot more rows of fruits/vegetables.
(to be fair, i visit both stores, in order to get the best from both worlds. dont judge me.)

I had to google how big my town's population was and what the hell

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagus_Ranch

why does this have its own wikipedia article?

they have that place on wikipedia, and they havent added the clock crew in there yet?
what the hell are we doing wrong?!

(no offence, phantom, im sure that this town is adorable, even if it is quite small).
seriously, we MUST get on wikipedia.
i've been trying to actively do this throughout 2016, and im gonna keep fighting until we will be added in there.
wikipedia or bust!

[BilliardBall10]

uh sorry guys, but i have to say hello+some cool stuff to some other people as well, so... im gonna post this one in here, last post for today, i promise.
with that being said, im gonna say hello to @yoyo @to other people:

hey man yeh i'm ok my life is in a constant state of turmoil that somehow reached a critical mass today and i inexplicably came here for shelter just like i did when i was 15 isnt that strange

im sorry to hear that. i hope that things will be better soon.

also: its not that strange, because most of us have returned back in CC either in our best or in our darkest times...
its a safe-haven, and most people to to places like that when they lose their hope...
(also nostalgia is a strong factor as well).

whats up, yoyo? its good to see you again, but i honestly hope that things will be better for you.
be well, man!

working on my mash-up novel

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I've been turning over in my mind ever since- "A single man in possession of a good fortune," he told me, "must be in want of a wife."

gonna be hot

hey man, sorry if i ask, but do you actually write a book? if not, you should.
you have some great story-telling skills, and your posts are often well-thought, clever and funny.
thats a rare skill.

I worked this morning and discovered I have no scheduled shifts for the next two weeks so I'm a little uneasy since I'm totally reliant on being called in at this stage. The worst of it being just that I'm so used to working every single day and just sort of sleeping on my days off that I don't even know what to do with myself.

Maybe I'll work on a cartoon

man, you should totally do a cartoon, it would be great!

going slightly loopy sitting at home[cool drawings]

hmmm, perhaps you could make a few flash movies? (if you want, that is. im just suggesting a cool pastime)
you have the skills, and the free time.
this would be epic.

last but not least,

I like this year's NG April Fool's prank. I mean, it's not even close to their best/most involved, but it gets to the point fast and then you're free. You're free.

yeah, this was a good/funny april fool's prank. and not just that, after you've got april fooled, you had the choice of being FREE for the rest of the day after the punchline was delivered.
FREEDOOOOOOM!11one

phantomcat, have you voted for NG's best movies of march? (our NG-monthly voting).
i didnt saw any clock-movies in the nominees list. i am sad.