Saturday, March 23, 2013
Friday, March 22, 2013
Subway: Stories from behind the counter.By Cesar Reyes Torres
To start off, there is a politics to working at a fast food chain. There is certain people you can't afford to piss off, and others who will try to use you to get information about others. It's a two faced game people play with each other. Fast food is the bottom of the income barrel in this country, and you do what you have to do to collect the most money on payday. Customers are a big part of business, without them the stores make no money, and the people who you make food for can make things interesting for you depending on how you treat them. At the Subway that I worked at, cops got one free foot long sandwich per day for free. It was the policy of the owner that was supposed to keep bums and low lives out of the store because cops would always be inside eating lunch everyday. It was amazing to see the little things they would tend to look the other way on, just because they new they were eating free. Parking tickets and traffic tickets were no longer a problem for us. If a girl got in a fight with her boyfriend and the police were called and it just so happened that that girl made them lunch that day, and she was going to make him lunch the next day, it kind of made them write the report slightly tilted in that's girls favour. And it also helped out the manager a lot when she's delivering eight balls or entire ounces of chronic marijuana to other subway stores in the area, the cops knew her car, and knew who she was, and saw her with her subway uniform on, and just waived hello when they saw her driving around downtown Long Beach. This really helps out distribution of the drugs that your delivering to the pot heads that work at different stores during a time before the widespread use of the Internet everywhere, that they didn't have a security cameras in the back behind the counter. So you can operate your side business without anyone knowing or suspecting anything.
If anyone ever said anything, it was pretty much your words against there's. nothing would probably become of the problem, and you would essentially be branded as a snitch. Nobody would be able to trust you, nobody would eat with you, you would probably have your request for days off denied, your hours would get cut, people started complaining you didn't work hard enough, and any friend you thought you had, had to essentially choose between loyalties. The question was very simple, Can I afford to piss off the person who is writing my schedule for the week? The answer was, no they couldn't. Eventually anybody who ever thought of opening there mouth about anything the manager was doing wrong just ended up quitting.
These were what I liked to call the Golden years of subway in downtown Long Beach. That sounds weird to say, but at the time my job was pretty good. I worked with good friends every day, I ate for free, we were close to the theatre so we could all go to the movies after wards. I got along with everyone in the store, the stores were making money, everybody who worked there was either related to someone, or was a close friend, the cops were on our side, and to top it all off I thought I was making good money, a whole 7.50 an hour.
The only downside was that a lot of the girls were dating hardcore gang members, who were not good people to say the least. And I base that off of the bruises that some if these girls showed up with on there face and body, the fact that in the coming years many if not all of them got locked up for 30 years to life. But at the time I only looked at the silver lining which was that I didn't have to fear any gang member in my neighbourhood, because their gang member boyfriends never saw me as a threat to them or their girlfriends, and I got the feeling that they trusted me and they generally left me alone in the gang infested neighbourhood that I lived on. I also didn't have to worry too much about the cops that were patrolling either. Not that I had a reason to fear the police, but generally speaking, I knew they would never harass me or ever probably question me on anything. This was the place that I grew up in since I was 14, so it became a second home for me. But that would change when...
To be continued
If anyone ever said anything, it was pretty much your words against there's. nothing would probably become of the problem, and you would essentially be branded as a snitch. Nobody would be able to trust you, nobody would eat with you, you would probably have your request for days off denied, your hours would get cut, people started complaining you didn't work hard enough, and any friend you thought you had, had to essentially choose between loyalties. The question was very simple, Can I afford to piss off the person who is writing my schedule for the week? The answer was, no they couldn't. Eventually anybody who ever thought of opening there mouth about anything the manager was doing wrong just ended up quitting.
These were what I liked to call the Golden years of subway in downtown Long Beach. That sounds weird to say, but at the time my job was pretty good. I worked with good friends every day, I ate for free, we were close to the theatre so we could all go to the movies after wards. I got along with everyone in the store, the stores were making money, everybody who worked there was either related to someone, or was a close friend, the cops were on our side, and to top it all off I thought I was making good money, a whole 7.50 an hour.
The only downside was that a lot of the girls were dating hardcore gang members, who were not good people to say the least. And I base that off of the bruises that some if these girls showed up with on there face and body, the fact that in the coming years many if not all of them got locked up for 30 years to life. But at the time I only looked at the silver lining which was that I didn't have to fear any gang member in my neighbourhood, because their gang member boyfriends never saw me as a threat to them or their girlfriends, and I got the feeling that they trusted me and they generally left me alone in the gang infested neighbourhood that I lived on. I also didn't have to worry too much about the cops that were patrolling either. Not that I had a reason to fear the police, but generally speaking, I knew they would never harass me or ever probably question me on anything. This was the place that I grew up in since I was 14, so it became a second home for me. But that would change when...
To be continued
Thursday, March 21, 2013
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