7-eleven day 1
It's a little less demanding than Starbucks as far as excellence goes. A certain casualness reflecting that the average patron spends 4 minutes in the place and is managing an addiction to one of your products.
I didn't get the culture talk I would have expected, like, about how 7-11 employees take pride in their store's cleanliness. The video training I had to watch spent 45 minutes on the Patriot Act and preventing Money Laundering, but when I checked with a colleague about how often the store in fact fills out the Suspicious Incident Reports required by the federal government for shifty characters purchasing weird Money Orders, she said never.*
The people working here are worried about the same things I'm worried about: getting custody of their children, managing their kids who have IEPs in a school closure, getting quarters for laundry, how to quit bad habits. The store is focused on being seen in the community as a place that is not notably easy to steal from. The patrons are buying scratchies, directing my hand to a specific pack of cigarettes like I'm a claw game grabbing stuffed animals -- over, up, up a little more -- and generally, everybody is incredibly patient, because nobody has anywhere to be.
The employees treat each other well. Nobody listens to Marketplace. Less podcasts, more cigarettes.
I like it. I've got 24 hours this week and the next, and then I think 32 hours, four days a week, 7-3. Which is a pretty nice schedule, and leaves me time to do my other work probably 25 hours a week.
Yesterday I had 3 work calls separate from 7-11, amounting to 5.5 hours of my own business work. This is what I tend to think happens: Sit at home unemployed and everything spirals down. Take a job, any job, and things will spiral up. Is my faith I guess.
*a note from the future: I did end up breaking the patriot act by failing to report a money order of too large a size, whoops. Regional was contacted and watched the video to see which cashier it was and sent an email to my boss saying “this cashier broke the patriot act and needs to fill out some forms.”