Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like Episode 16, The Big Picture
This blog parses the changes in my middle age and how I went from working as a columnist at a major daily newspaper and a leading cheesemonger to being a beer buyer at a fancy grocery store and how I maintain hope of finding happiness. It’s underpinned by an element of confusion fatigue, frustration fatigue and fatigue fatigue, but it’s about life and downward mobility in New York City 2018, which is never dull.
Life on Aisle 2: This is What Plan C Looks Like
Episode 16: The Big Picture
When I see unfamiliar customers on the beer aisle approach them with this introduction.
“Hey, how are you doing today? If you have any questions on our beers or ciders, please don’t hesitate to ask. I’ll be happy to address them. I’m one of the buyers here.”
There’s a lot to unpack in the salutation. For one, it tells them that they don’t have to stand and stare aimlessly at several hundred craft beers and wonder which one is right for them. Two, in a big picture way, it offers to make the experience of shopping far more convivial than say ordering online. That’s something that nearly all of my coworkers on the sales floor are aware of, and so the guy in the Yankee hat gets asked about his hopes for the Bomber’s playoff chances; the woman in the Duke sweatshirt gets asked about friends in Florence’s way, and so on. I like to tell people that I no longer follow the NFL passionately, but I do keep track professionally. That way if I see a guy in a Kansas City Chiefs jersey on a Sunday afternoon, I can offer a quick comment about their stunning new quarterback.
The response to my salutation on Aisle 2 varies based on gender. A few women shrug off the offer as if it were a come on or worse I’m implying that women don’t know much about beer (which is far from the truth. I learned some about beer from Mark, Dave and Ray, but even more from Gina, Jen and Maggie. A lot of my networking these days involves Lila, Colleen, Holly and Ally). Most women recognize that the conviviality in the offer is genuine and a discussion often ensues about craft beer. On the other hand, many men curtly refuse the offer. It’s as if there’s this notion that their Y chromosome also comes with cicerone skills, when in fact I’m certain that the city’s leading cicerone, Anne Beccera (ahem, have you lost that stereotype yet about craft beer being a boy’s game yet?), would happily tell you that the beer scene is so fast changing that you HAVE to ask questions to keep up. A discussion ensues with some men, and a few hear the last part of the salutation and ask, “wow, what a cool job, what do you do?”
That’s a long answer. The short of it is simple. I meet with sales reps and place orders and email breweries and reps from boutique distributors and place orders. Piece of cake, right? Wrong, the hard part is knowing what to order. I run one of the best retail craft beer programs in the city. People come from New Jersey, Pennsylvania and even Texas to shop here (okay the Texan is an airplane pilot and she shops only when she has overnight stay after a local landing but still). I keep my ear to the ground to stay on top of the latest developments. That means spending at least a half hour a day on Instagram looking at brewery’s pages and those from likeminded retailers. That means strategic bar hopping so that I can talk to buyers and managers of high-end craft beer bars in the vicinity, see what’s on their list and even peruse the kegs that are next. And yes, it means drinking probably eight to ten beers a week purely for research; dozens of bartenders in this neighborhood have fielded a request from me for a sample pour of something I’m considering ordering when its available in cans.
It’s a lot of work, and no, I’m not complaining in the least. It’s a really cool job, and I feel fortunate to have such a stimulating situation. Yet, I work 30–35 hours a week. There are no paid vacations. All that bar hopping is not on some company credit card. And, if I don’t match my paycheck from the store with comparable writing income, then I can’t pay all of my bills. So yes, I work another 30–40 hours a week either generating prose or researching outlets who might pay me for the prose I generate. There are fewer and fewer of those, which means that I spend more time looking for writing work than I do writing. And that means that the research part of the beer gig often takes on a medicinal angle.
Yes, it’s upwards of 70 hours a week of stuff I love to do, and I’m the son of two workaholics and younger brother of two others. I can handle this load. Still, there’s something profoundly negative that occurs from this situation. I lose the big picture sometimes. In NFL parlance, I become focused obsessively on first downs and forget about touchdowns. I have tended make the goal working 70 hours a week and getting the bills paid rather than working fewer hours a week, travelling some, going to yoga more often (or even more ambitiously resuming dance classes!), reading more, etc. In other words, I have made being solvent the goal rather than being happy.
I don’t think of it as a moral failing. It’s only natural that when you work so hard to survive, you forget that the object of this here game of life is to thrive. I had lost track of that goal, but it came back to me in an unexpected way recently. I was having a day where I was weary, not really 100% either though not truly under the weather, and I was looking ahead to several more hours of retail work. A regular customer came by to get some coffee and asked how I was doing. I heaved a sigh and said, “just hanging in there I guess.”
He smiled as he drew a cup and said, “well that’s the best we can do.”
My inner voice scoffed, and I said to myself “maybe that the best you can do, buddy, but I want to be doing well, doing…” and suddenly the inner copy editor and fact checker in me cut off that line of thought and offered a nice skeptical “really?”
I felt myself falling down a rabbit hole of introspection, which is not a good headspace for a retail sales floor, so I went downstairs to the stock room, ostensibly to paw around the milk crates of loose bottles to complete some six packs that had been reduced to five items. It was a good, mindless activity while I thought things through, and since I don’t speak Arabic, French or Spanish fluently enough to converse with the my coworkers based in the stockroom, I would likely be left to my own devices.
I thought about a longtime friend who lives in NYC. He recently told me he was going to hold his 60th birthday party in New Orleans and that I should make my flight reservations early since it would be around the time of the Jazz and Heritage Festival. I had to stymie the urge to yell at him; it felt like just the sort of thing that someone in the job bubble would say to shame someone trapped in the gig economy. I took for granted I would have to save my pennies diligently just to go to Eleven Madison Park or a comparable venue to celebrate his birthday. A plane trip, a stay in New Orleans? Are you freakin’ kidding me!
But, but…wouldn’t it be a blast to go to New Orleans? While the request bordered on tone deaf to my situation, if my finances can’t handle a trip for a friend’s birthday, isn’t there something wrong with my finances? Can’t I fix that? I began to wonder if my friend’s invitation wasn’t a vote of confidence that I could get out of this hole.
I decided that merely getting up to date on the bills, while an admirable goal, wasn’t setting the bar high enough. I needed a definition of fun that was more ambitious than enjoying new double IPA at a favorite neighborhood craft beer bar or an hour on a yoga mat. I needed a weekly dose of that while maybe saving money for a trip or too.
Otherwise, my customer was right. Just hanging in there *is* the best I can do.
I found a few bottles that would complete some six packs, restacked the milk crates, and I returned to the sales floor. En route, I decided that instead of grabbing take out on the way home, I’d pick up a salmon fillet, dust in a spicy rub and grill it. It would be a little dose of life. I tend to work hard so that I can work harder, and having a cool job makes that easier on the spirit. Instead, I needed to work hard so I can play hard, even if playing hard might require a little practice.
Martin Johnson is a freelance writer whose work on music, sports and culture has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Newsday, New York, Vogue, Rolling Stone, The Root, Slate, The Atlantic, and numerous other publications and websites. He also blogs at Rotations, and he can be contacted at thejoyofcheese@gmail.com.
