Thinking of You

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, and for the past four years I wake on the Monday before Thanksgiving thinking of you—all my Whole Foods Market friends who are working this week. Thanksgiving week is the hardest week of the year in food retail. Everyone celebrates Thanksgiving, which means everyone is shopping, and almost everyone will wait until today or tomorrow to do that shopping. Many of these people will be stressed and rushed and cranky, and it is not uncommon for customers to yell at you, and blame you for any and everything that goes wrong.

Here are some of my nuttiest recollections from  Thanksgivings past:

A woman called the store Friday after the holiday to say we had ruined her dinner; the giblets were missing from the turkey. At first I assumed she had bought an oven-ready turkey prepared in-store, and we had forgotten to include the bag with the neck and giblets, but as she talked I realized she had bought a packaged turkey from the meat department. As I explained to her, those turkeys come in from the producer already packaged, and we have no way of knowing if there are giblets in the packaging. She seemed surprised when I explained to her that we didn’t process poultry at the store, and said we should really open each turkey to make sure the giblets were included. Of course I apologized, and let her know that if she had called us Thanksgiving, the store was open, and we could have given her some giblets, but she was insistent we refund the cost of the entire dinner as her family was unable to enjoy the meal without giblet gravy.

My first Thanksgiving I was working in the prepared foods department where we sold lots of pre-made sides. The chef was someone who didn’t like to work with any production lists or systems of any kind. One of the biggest sellers for us was mashed potatoes, and we kept checking in to make sure there were plenty. Questions of ‘how  much did you make?” were met with cryptic answers like “a lot”. Late Wednesday night as we were getting ready to close, and going through the walk-in cooler to check on what we had left we saw a Lexan container filled with mashed potatoes. Lexans come in many sizes, and this was the biggest one we had. In it was about 100 pounds of mashed potatoes, that we would never be able to use or sell. At least we were able to donate them to a shelter.

For years we never offered cooked turkeys, but one year a woman showed up for her cooked turkey asking for the chef by name. I went back to see what the story was, and sure enough the chef had promised this woman a cooked turkey, which he had ready to go, wrapped beautifully. As he proudly walked it out to her, carrying it high, there was a near riot by people furious because they had tried to order a cooked turkey and been told we didn’t sell them.

There were the years we ran out of things like mashed sweet potatoes, and we were making them and delivering them to people’s houses.  The year we couldn’t get anyone to deliver diesel fuel for our  refrigerated truck, and I filled containers loaded in the trunk of my car (I never got the smell out). The years it snowed, the years it felt more like spring than coming winter. Years it felt like everything that could was going wrong, and years that went so smoothly it seemed the Thanksgiving Gods were smiling on us.

Do I miss the madness that is Thanksgiving at Whole Food Market? Not even a little. But every year this week, my Whole Foods Market friends, I’m thinking of you.