When I volunteered to bring roasted vegetables to our Christmas dinner, it didn't occur to me that, for freshness' sake, this would entail grocery shopping on one of the busiest days of the year. The Giant parking lot was jammed, and the produce section could have used someone directing traffic, but all in all my fellow shoppers seemed either festive or only slightly frazzled.
It was fun to see types of people I don't normally see in the grocery store, like a Lucius Malfoy lookalike purchasing a ham (oh, please! Lucius would doubtless send his House Elf) and a man with a gruesome neck tattoo of a skull and a dagger pondering whether to buy cream cheese or the lower-fat variant, Neufchatel.
While I was weighing the tahini options, a man with a store nametag came up to me and asked if I was finding everything OK. I told him I was and complimented him on how smoothly everything seemed to be running: all the cash registers were open and workers were busy throughout the store restocking the shelves. He thanked me and explained that he was the district manager paying a visit. Just then the store manager, wearing a headset, came rushing up and beamed when I told him I'd been saying nice things about his store to his boss. He in turn praised his hard-working associates and shared his hard-earned wisdom: the key to managing a hectic shopping day, he said, is having enough workers and enough product on hand.
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