My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [22]
“The checks for the deliverymen are in the cash register, under the drawer, and there are three of them, just in case the beer guy shows up,” Gab says before leaving. “Not the beer guy who delivers Heineken, but the beer guy who delivers Brooklyn Lager. Next to the register is the price list, and I’ve attached instructions for making a void, in case you have to. Don’t forget to refresh the cash supply every few hours, and don’t try to do the lottery machine yourself, or put too much meat on people’s sandwiches, or too much sugar in their coffee. Don’t forget to ID anyone who looks underage and, oh God, am I forgetting anything? Yes! Turn on the awning lights when it gets dark or people will think we’re closed, and if anyone from upstairs comes in, ask if they can turn up the heat—it’s freezing. And your parking meter! Did you park on the street? The fine is one hundred and five dollars as of this week. Can you keep all that in your head?”
I nod and make a cocky face like Who, me? But the truth is, I have never felt so ill-prepared in my life. Yesterday, while Gab was at the closing, I got a small taste of the action in the store, but Kay made me spend the whole time stocking (Kay is now the boss, and we’re not supposed to disobey her—not that I would be inclined to), and when we got home Gab advised me that today would be much, much harder. I had no doubt that she would be right. Still, at that point I wasn’t nervous. When you live in New York you shop at delis every day, and you become accustomed to seeing what clerks do. It’s easy to think, I can pour a cup of coffee. I can butter a bagel. I can punch a lottery ticket. So can anyone.
It is only after stepping up to the register that I realize how wrong I am. A deli worker is lucky if he gets to focus his attention on just buttering a bagel, pouring coffee or punching a lottery ticket. Much of the time he has to do at least two of those tasks at once, while in his mind he has to be doing at least seven, no matter what’s going on with his hands.
And then there’s the cash register, the bane of every clerk-in-training’s existence. Ours, a Royal Alpha 9150 cash-management system with fifty daunting, multicolored keys, conspicuously lacks one of those nifty handheld price scanners I was looking forward to beaming against customers’ behinds. The cash register has an effect on me similar to quadratic equations and French movies—that is, it makes me yawn uncontrollably and feel instantly and hopelessly defeated. Kay says I only need to learn how to use about five out of those fifty keys, but every time I look for them I get lost in a sea of “CONF-L”, “” and MULTI-TAX LEVEL T.
Embarrassingly, though, my biggest struggle is with the money itself. I have always had a hard time handling cash: my hands go meaty and numb when I touch it. It started at a young age, when my parents caught me strutting around our house triumphantly showing off a couple of dollars I’d saved. “Put those away!” they barked at me. After that I noticed that my parents were always washing money in the laundry, leaving it in places where they would never find it, or storing it in undignified locations like sock drawers. They weren’t intentionally careless, but they seemed careful not to be too careful with it either.
“Here,” Kay says, handing me a stack of twenties. “Count this.”
As soon as I start counting, the bills squirt from my fingers and land on the floor. Kay gasps. Both of us bend down, taking our eye off the open till of the Royal Alpha for a dangerous second.
“Try something else,” she says, handing me a Snickers bar. “I want to buy this. Pretend I am customer.”
Taking the bar, I turn unsteadily toward the register, where the first symbol I see looks like a Mayan hieroglyph.
“Some kind of problem?” Kay says, watching me stand there with my mouth hanging open, a single digit frozen in midair.
I turn to her and wince. “How much is it?” I ask. “The candy bar, I mean.”
“You don’t know? I thought Gaby gave you price list.”
Our store has over a thousand different products,