I tied on my apron and leaned against the counter I had worked for thirty years, and I let the numbers do the talking.
The regional bosses walked the store. When they reached the meat department, the manager started his pitch about pre-packaged and centralized. Then one of the bosses pulled the department’s sales figures for the six weeks since he had begun phasing me out.
They had fallen through the floor. The full-service meat counter had been the highest-margin, highest-traffic department in the store — the reason people drove past two other groceries to shop here. Wrap it all in plastic off a truck, and the customers simply stopped buying meat. Shrink went up. The Saturday roast crowd went to the butcher one town over.
Then there was the order book. Every Thanksgiving turkey, every Christmas prime rib, every hunter’s deer that came in during season — hundreds of custom orders a year, all built on people who trusted my hands, not a case. Those orders were already walking out the door with me.
He said it was a job a case could do. A case can hold the meat. It can’t tell a young mother how to feed four kids on ten dollars of chuck.
The bosses can read a P&L. Before they left, they told the manager the full-service counter was staying, and asked me to run it — and to train butchers for the other stores that had made the same mistake.
The manager was moved to a warehouse by the end of the month.
I still stand at that block. I still save the good bones for Mrs. Antczak’s soup. Last week I walked a nervous newlywed through his first brisket, start to finish.
Turns out that was never just a wage. That was thirty years of a town that likes to look the man cutting their dinner in the eye.