Talking about trolleys, my first job some forty years ago now was as a trolley boy in Sainsburys. There were three of us on a rotating shift basis, we had to count the trolleys twice a day, before opening and after closing, and record the number in a book. In the evening after closing and counting them, depending on how many were short we would go round the streets and retrieve as many as we could find. You got to know the spots where people dumped them and could generally find the majority of them fairly quickly, but sometimes it was necessary to go a little further afield.
Anyway, one year it was Christmas Eve and we were closing at 2:30pm (yes, really). I was on the close, earlier in the day the store manager asked me for the trolley count book. He looked at it and said “right, there’s X trolleys in this book, and I want X trolleys before you go home”….we closed the store, I rounded up everything from the store car park and got them back in the trolley bay, counted them up and found we were some forty short. I went round the nearby known dumping spots and quickly found nearly thirty, so after bringing them back I set off again to check further afield and found a few more.By the time I came back with the second batch it was approaching 4:00pm and the manager was at the store entrance…..
Where the bloody ‘ell you been boy, we’re waiting to go home”!
“You wanted X trolleys guv”.
“How many you got”?
“X minus four”.
“That’ll do, come on, shove ‘em in the bay and lock up so we can bugger off and enjoy Christmas”……