Niece Workin' With Ya!

Thirty-two-year-old Dave Peterson has worked for the Big D Supermarket for nearly a decade. He’s seen many supervisors come and go during his tenure as a stocker and later as a department head. So, when his store had an opening for an assistant manager, he figured he’d be a shoo-in for the promotion.

“It’s not just that I put in the time here,” Dave explained to us. “I know this store inside and out. I’ve brought in the carts in the rain and snow, I’ve cleaned up more barf and urine than I care to admit, and I’ve come to regard our regulars as friends when they come to visit our store. That’s what made it so hard when they passed on me for the promotion.”

“We stopped hiring management people from the inside,” District Manager and corporate goon Sam Goodwin explained. “We’ve had several incidents where our management team gave the people who used to work with them perks and allowed them to goof off on the clock. After we caught a recently-promoted member of management allowing a former colleague to sell his underage buddies beer, we decided to change the policy.”

There was, of course, another problem.

“Nobody wants to work anymore,” Goodwin said with a shrug.

Applicants for Big D were at an all-time low when Dave’s store needed a new assistant manager. It seemed they had little choice in who they could get for the job, but luckily their state passed a new law that opened the doors for a wider group of eligible potential employees. That’s how they found their newest assistant manager: Madison Ellsworth.

“The whole store thought it was great and welcomed her with open arms,” Dave said. “She might not have had experience managing a store or working in retail, but she took to the job with gusto. I wasn’t a fan, but it wasn’t just because I thought I’d be great in the role of assistant manager. Having my preteen niece as my direct supervisor didn’t jive with me at all.”

That’s right. Big D hired twelve-year-old Madison, Dave’s sister’s daughter, to oversee the store.

“My mom said I could take the job as long as I got all my homework done before my shifts,” Madison said. “She still thought I was too young to start working, but I’ve got a student lunch debt to pay off. Once she found out Uncle Dave worked there, she came around.”

“This kid is going to get someone killed!” Dave exclaimed, unprompted. “Who lets a twelve-year-old run the store? I don’t think it’s too dramatic to say there is a lot to know about cross-contamination with your raw meat products, dangerous machinery in the receiving area, and someone in sixth grade can’t comprehend these things, smart as Madison may be.”

“I’m in seventh grade, not sixth!” Madison argued. “That means I’m in middle school now! I’m not a little kid!” Taking a sip from her juice box, she left to take care of some counts for the cashiers on register.

“It’s not only her age that’s an issue,” Dave continued. “I got paged into her office to discuss a small ordering error I made. She just looked at me and said, ‘bruh’ and expected me to know what that meant.”

“That wasn’t the last time I had to reprimand Uncle Dave either,” Madison said. “Bruh was taking mad L’s.”

“Is she talking about the thing with the spill in the dairy section?” Dave asked incredulously. “I told her I’m not a porter, but she didn’t want to listen to me. Friggin’ preteens.”

“I don’t see why he got so out of pocket about it,” Madison argued. “Someone had to mop up that milk, and he wasn’t doing anything major. I think he’s got beef because he’s taking orders from a girl.”

“That’s right!” Dave confirmed. “It’s not that I’m sexist or anything, but she’s twelve. TWELVE! She should’ve cut me a little slack being my niece and all.”

“Why’s he so hung up on my age anyway?” Madison asked. “I’m gonna be thirteen in July. I thought Uncle Dave would be cool with me working here, but he’s being all extra about it. Nobody else acts like they want to throw hands when I ask them to do something.”

“I don’t get Dave’s problem,” three-year employee John Mund told us. “Madison’s a great boss! I think he has some hang ups because he thinks he’s the Big D goat or whatever.”

“Oh yeah, Dave was all pissy because he thought that job would be his,” cashier Robin Silvers said. “You would have thought he’d already become assistant manager by the way he was acting all high and mighty about it. If you ask me, Madison taking the job definitely took him down a few pegs, and he took that shit personally as fuck.”

“Madison is one of the best assistant managers I’ve had working under me,” Store Manager Vivica Spring said. “I don’t understand how anyone would have a problem with her, let alone her uncle.”

Dave’s issues under Madison’s management came to a head one Tuesday morning when she asked him to stock the freezers after a shipment of ice cream arrived.

“It shouldn’t have been a big deal,” Madison said, “so I don’t know why he got all salty about having to do it.”

“I had my break planned out that day,” Dave argued. “I was going to sit in the parking lot with Jolene from the floral department, and she’s a total smokeshow. So, I went on my break as planned and figured I could take care of it after that. It would be OK for fifteen minutes.”

But it wasn’t OK. What should have been a fifteen minute break turned into almost an hour where the ice cream sat in the middle of the aisle waiting to be put away. It melted, causing a mess that took the rest of the afternoon to clean, and the product had to be zeroed out. 

“She didn’t tell me she had a receiver bring it out to the aisle!” Dave exclaimed when shown pictures of the horrific mess made by his breaktime necking. “So what if I took a little longer than usual?! She shouldn’t have had it put out there like that!”

“I didn’t expect him to disappear with that thicc lady from the floral department,” Madison explained. “He should’ve done the job when I told him to do it instead of acting like he got some rizz. He said he’d get right on it, and I had no idea he wanted to go out vibin’ with Jolene. He’d been doing a mid job the whole time, and that’s why he wound up getting yeeted.”

In this instance, getting ‘yeeted’ meant Dave was fired from Big D for being ‘mid’ or ‘grossly incompetent at his job and insubordinate’. 

“I gave this company almost ten years of my life!” Dave cried when we brought up his firing. “And to be let go by your niece?! Just the icing on the friggin’ cake! What I did wasn’t even as bad as what some other employees do! Go ask Oscar in produce what he was doing in the walk-in cooler with the District Manager’s daughter on the clock!”

“He told you about that?” Oscar, a nineteen-year-old employee, asked in return when we reached out for comment. “Motherfucker.”

“Who did what with my daughter?!” Goodwin exclaimed.

“Look,” Madison said as we pressed her on her uncle’s firing. “I didn’t want to fire Uncle Dave, but it’s part of the job. He was being way too zesty. Besides, I had to quit like a week later because my mom grounded me for firing Uncle Dave. I said, ‘bruh!’ but she still grounded me for a month. It really sucks, like a lot.”

Now this Big D location is down two employees, and a family is suffering from the drama from the whole ordeal. One thing we know for sure is their holidays are going to be extra tense this year!