NOTE: THIS STORY IS NOT IN MY LATEST BOOK, DOWN THE SHORE.
Wildwood, NJ – 1985-1986
I had been working at Home Video Centers in Northfield, NJ for two years. It was a fun job and the people I worked with were cool. But at some point, I could see the writing on the wall. A small privately-owned audio/video store would soon suffer the fate of many small businesses. Companies like Circuit City, and Silo could sell the same cameras and VCRs for much less than we could due to volume.
Also… Blockbuster Video was about to become the next big thing.
At some point, someone had the brilliant idea to start selling white goods in the video store. I could see this was the beginning of the end. Who goes into a video store to buy a washer, dryer, or refrigerator? Nobody I know.
The pressure was getting to me and I reached a point of frustration so I quit. But I was 23 years old without another job lined up. I was still living with my parents so at least I had a roof over my head.
I was unemployed for about a week when my father got me a job at his favorite liquor store in Somer’s Point. It was called Circle Liquor and was one of the most profitable liquor stores on the east coast. It was in a great location nestled between the resort/retirement communities of Ocean City and Margate. Ocean City was a dry town, (no alcohol was sold in the town) so everybody got their beer, wine, and liquor at our store.
It was an okay job. Running the register and stocking the shelves were my primary duties. I was settling into a life of mediocrity at this point.
There was also an interesting cast of characters that worked there. First, there was the owner, who was a nice guy who was rich and drunk most of the time. There was the general manager who was a vacant old guy who dyed his hair and was a retail loser. He may have owned part of the store but I’m not sure. I do know he had this twenty-something weird daughter who would just come into the store and take money out of the registers to go shopping. I know it sounds mean but she seemed like an inbred semi-retarded person. Just awful. There was another guy who was in his twenties but looked older, named Bill. He was a nice guy but it just seemed like there was a black cloud hanging over his head. We started to refer to him as “the black cloud.”
Then there was this little fat sloppy guy named Chester. Chester was a nice guy who had formerly been a blackout drunk but got his act together. He was the manager of the store and dedicated his life to the place. He knew everything about every bottle of wine and booze in the store. I’ve never met another person who knew so much about wine in my life.
So, I worked there and had a pretty decent time. I met this new hire named Ferdinand who was a real character. He was a tall, good-looking guy who floated through life without a care in the world. He had a nice apartment down at the beach in Ocean City and had a hot girlfriend. The reason Ferd didn’t care about anything was that his father owned a trucking firm. He had passed away and left his family a fortune. His Will stated that Ferd would get his inheritance when his younger sister turned 30 so he was just biding his time working jobs until his ship came in. So, he didn’t care about anything but having a good time.
I remember we once got all these cases of wines that came in wooden cases. The boxes were cool because they were rustic but sturdy and could be used for other things once you removed the bottles from them. They could be made into bookcases, storage boxes, or containers to hold your music cassettes and videotapes.
Chester said that if we wanted any of the empty wooden cases we could have them because they were only going to be broken down and thrown away. But Ferd came up with the brilliant idea of taking some of the wooden cases at the end of his shift. But the thing was, he would fill them with bottles of wine and liquor before carrying them out to his car. He must have quietly stolen dozens of bottles of liquor out of Circle Liquor without anyone ever catching on.
I was still very much suffering from my failure as a musician and in life in general and just went through the motions of working there. During the holidays we would get tons of liquor gift sets in and I’ve never seen a store with so many varieties in all my life.
The money was rolling in from Thanksgiving through New Year and the place was always busy. People would pull up to the store and order tons of stuff and it was our job to carry all of the cases and bags out to their cars. Just crap labor. Sometimes they’d give you a tip so that was cool, but it was grinding work. I think the more mundane the work, and the age of the staff, there are going to be hijinks.
When it was cold out and we had to run back and forth carrying stuff out to people’s cars we’d open miniature bottles back in the warehouse and take sips from them to keep warm. But by the end of your shift, you were half in the bag. Oh, and speaking of the warehouse in the back… it was an absolute disaster back there. The place was an absolutely unmade bed. Boxes are strewn everywhere and just a mess back there. They had no idea how much or little they had due to the crazy volume the store did day in and day out. It was pretty easy to clip the occasional bottle if you could figure out how to get it out the door. Ferd exploited this. I never did.
Eventually, because I was doing a good job, they put me in charge of the imported beer section. Now, this was the mid-80s and fancy beer wasn’t a thing back then like it is today. So the section of the store I managed was simply an end cap. A section at the end of one of the aisles is about 7 feet tall by 5 feet wide. But the area where all of the excess stock was stored in the warehouse I made my own. It was the only section of the entire warehouse that was organized. I took pride in my little section and kept it neat.
Along the back was the cold box. Door after door of flow racks of beer. Hundreds of cases and six-packs kept cold in a giant walk-in refrigerator. It was massive. Many times during the last hour of my shift I would go in there and stock up on the six-packs. There was a teenage kid who would come in around 4 pm and that was his job for the evening. He kept his winter coat on and just stayed inside the giant refrigerated walk-in all night.
Sometimes at the end of my shift, I’d go in there and help him if I didn’t have anything else to do and chat with him about music. We’d even have the occasional cigarette in there. Sometimes Ferd would join us and he’d grab a couple of cans of whip cream and do whip its. That was always good for a laugh.
The move the teenager used to make was this. While loading all of the flow racks with beer he had to break down a lot of the cardboard cases the beer came in. They were tossed into a dumpster out in the back of the store. But there was a big door that led from the giant walk-in fridge to the parking lot.
So during his shift, he would take a couple of cases of beer and put them out back under a pile of broken-down cardboard boxes. It was wintertime so the beer stayed cold and hidden.
After he finished his shift he’d drive by with his friends and they’d pick up the free cases of beer from out back of the store and no one was ever the wiser. I don’t know how long he did this but it was a great way to get free beer for underage kids.
I never participated in any of this criminal behavior that was going on throughout the store for years because no one was paying any attention. I would just have the occasional pony bottle Lowenbrau at the end of my shift in there with this guy.
More next week!
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