ye old times

Shrinkflation? Old and busted. 😒

Literally just fucking lying? Now we’re talking! 😩

As a vet of this industry i wish i had something useful to contribute. not Canada though but adjacent. so here’s a semi-related Tale of from my old Workplace

We did most of our weighing in house and i took it very seriously. if the meat was drippy or slimely, weighing came first then we’d wrap an extra layer so nobody would get gooey hands picking it up.

However, there is one customer (who was trouble, and not in a cool based way) really pissed me off one day coming in accusing me of misweighing his meat. the weight was not matching, so there was a crisis as it was during lockdowns, I was stressed and overworked (7 day weeks, on day 40ish), and started trying to frantically verify if my scales had been shorting people the entire time.

After calming down I noticed the cut was missing a huge chunk and had been very obviously opened and hastily, sloppily rewrapped. he brought it from fucking home! then this old asshole described me as “a foreigner” to complain to other members of my team about me. it was very weird. after the confrontation he would always refer to me as the “foreign person” which was just baffling since i have no accent and only brownish on account of the that curses me. i even code switch to sound more like a rural local instead of where i am originally from (all in the same U.S. region)

Just chud shit i guess. Usually customers are too intimidated by me and i get a long fine with them by just being quick and responsive vs. the kind of simpering attitude corporate prefers.

He loved making bulk orders and confusing the register people and stealing what he could or just walking out with the meat. my policy is “i didn’t see anything” but he was just reselling the meat after drying it and marking it up x20 to sell to people he knew in town. still I never narced on him, just asked the cashiers to check his whole box and had to deal with getting written up for the inventory miss that month

The Lesson: if you are going to shoplift don’t get in a wild confrontation with the meat manager first and accuse her of “ripping you off” and creating a crisis with our scale weights. it wasn’t a co-op i didn’t get a cut of the profits, wtf would i have to gain

everything old is new again

bringing my own digital scale to the deli counter and holding eye contact with the butcher while I place my order

it’s telling that even in dumbass US, in some of the most reactionary/pro-business dumps, there are laws going far back to the earliest days of the state requiring annual inspection of scales and other commercial measuring tools by sometimes unrelated state agencies. like gas pumps being inspected and certified by a department of agriculture.

you know the scale owners weren’t behind that.