Dave was awesome; be like Dave
“Your mother doesn’t work here, so clean up after yourselves!”
The saying — and sometimes posted workplace sign — goes back many generations. It is as accurate a manager’s credo as it is timeless. And, of course, applies perfectly in any produce department.
In my early produce years, I worked for a few laissez-faire managers who didn’t really push much order. And it showed in how the department operated: erratic orders, messy back rooms, disheveled displays, dirty fixtures. This led to inconsistent quality, erratic sales, questionable customer satisfaction, out-of-control labor spending, poor employee morale and more.
Who could feel good about working in such an environment?
By the time I was assistant produce manager in my early 20s, I was assigned to help open a new store and work under “Dave.” At first, nobody really cared for Dave. He was a list-maker. Dave was a clean freak and, when things didn’t go exactly the way he wanted, he became, shall we say, grouchy.
As time went on, however, I learned to love the guy — Aa did the rest of our crew.
Dave was to produce management what Gen. George McClellan was to organizing Union troops during the Civil War: very thorough and one who left little to chance. Every day, we cleaned, we stocked, we merchandised. Not to just any old whim, but according to Dave’s careful planning.
Everything was organized and regularly cleaned, including the back dock receiving area, the cooler, the prep table, the front-end fixtures, the little desk in our back room. Even our bulletin board was arranged neatly with current labor schedules, merchandising schemes and fixture cleaning charts. Every produce item had a designated storage area in the cooler, and without exception, everything else had its place, from the stapler to knives, to where we hung up our aprons at the end of a shift.
Dave made this all very clear on why he insisted on being “this way.”
“It only takes a minute to sweep up a mess,” he once said. “It shouldn’t take you 20 minutes to find a broom.”
Of course, he was right. And, of course, we barely tolerated him for the nitpicky discipline … at first. Little by little, we all came to appreciate and even embrace the wisdom of his ways. “Besides,” he always pointed out, “this is a fresh-food environment. Get it together, people!”
It rubbed off on the whole crew. We discovered how much we liked working in a clean environment. We held our heads up a little more and took pride in our work as we also shadowed Dave’s efficient lead, his open example of tracking and posting sales, the produce department’s percentage of store sales and more. A crew likes to know how the department is performing, and Dave liked keeping score.
Managing a produce department is about hard work all right, but it’s also about forging a good routine and sticking to it. Every morning, Dave insisted that we straighten, cull and detail the entire department. As we methodically did this, we made notes on a legal pad. On the page were four headings: Items to rotate that day, things we had to clean, merchandising changes and, of course, “other/miscellaneous” tasks. Left on the backroom desk, the crew followed these daily plans and scratched off each task as completed — which also gives a person a sense of accomplishment. It feels good.
After all these years, this old produce scribe makes to-do lists. It works wonders to help stay focused.
There was no such thing as a slow day with Dave. He kept up with merchandising, product prep, ad planning, meetings, training, bookwork; like all of us, he took two days off every week and rarely worked overtime. When other departments in the store fell behind and caught our district manager’s wrath, they scrambled to catch up with deep cleaning and more, creating tension and going over budget. Meanwhile, we stood alone, almost never having to play catch-up and smiling knowingly when others in the store suggested, “You guys in produce, you have it easy.” We knew what it took to be successful, and nothing about it came easy. Amid this remarkable discipline, Dave was a true mentor — quiet and humble … and only occasionally, grouchy.
Armand Lobato works for the Idaho Potato Commission. His 40 years of experience in the produce business span a range of foodservice and retail positions.
Related articles: