The Septagenarian Bagging My Groceries at Fosters

At the supermarket today, I got to thinking about how different some stores are than others. It has to do with the age of the people who work there, and how many of them there are.  I was at family-owned Fosters Market in Greenfield.  When I went to ask the grocery manager about something we had ordered he was a man much older than me.  Then when I was checking out, the man bagging my groceries was a jolly septagenarian.   Contrast this with my next stop,  Big Y.

Here the average age is a pimply 18 or 19, it seems.  They’re always friendly, and wear retro style uniforms with little bow ties, and they are nearly all quite young.  I thought about what it would be like to own a market filled with dozens of staff who are contemplating their retirement’s golden years just down the road a bit.  Or a place where people have barely begun to fill up their 401K plans, and rarely require any doctor’s visits.

But the bigger question is what is it like and how sustainable is it to have a staff of oldsters?  Can these mature staff be content with the wages that are offered for jobs like this?  Can they be expected to afford their own houses, and pay for their grandchildren’s eductations on grocery store wages?

Last night on Colbert, the editor of Newsweek was on, relaying the bad news that the Washington Post has finally decided to unload the unprofitable print magazine. So many of the staffers might be let go.  It’s a rarity, said the man, that a company pays more in wages than they do for newsprint.  Most papers don’t but the elegant Newsweek and top papers like the WSJ and the New York Times still do. 

I never thought that much about labor costs till I had a payroll.