Prologue
Jobs
Have you ever been inside a grocery warehouse? I don’t mean a Grocery Outlet or Costco or Sam’s Club. I mean a real grocery warehouse. One of those buildings that’s close to a million square feet, where driving a car from one end to the other would take a few minutes, where the ceiling is so high you would need glasses to see what’s up there and the temperature can vary as much as sixty degrees from one section to the next. A building where tens of thousands of boxes of barbecue sauce, grapes, coconut water, chicken thighs, turbinado sugar, oat milk, cupcakes, soy sauce, jalapeño peppers, fusilli noodles, paper towels, microwave burritos, and everything else you could possibly want from a grocery store is piled on shelves that seem to reach the sky and go on farther than the eye can see? You ever been in one of those? Most people haven’t. Everyone knows that food comes from farms and is carried to stores on trucks. But very few people think about this step of the supply chain, which happens in a room as big as a city block, filled from floor to ceiling with boxes.
I only know about it because I worked in a grocery warehouse once. It was one of many jobs I have had in enormous warehouses and fulfillment centers. This was not the line of work I planned to go into, of course. It’s not really the line of work anyone plans to go into. For a while, I thought I was going to be an athlete. Maybe football or track. I was good at both. Then I was going to be a rapper or a music executive. Now
that seemed like the perfect job for me. I was always good at talking, at leading people and connecting. I always had a vision for how things could be bigger, better than they are now. I always loved interacting with people, hearing their stories, cracking jokes, and making friends.
And I was always the kind of person people paid attention to, whether I wanted them to or not. It’s like I would walk into a room and suddenly eyes would be on me. Some people don’t like that about me. But early on I recognized it as a gift that I needed to make the best of. I didn’t necessarily always like it, but I embraced it.
What else can you do? You have to embrace what’s true. I never saw any need to dim my light just for other people to feel better.
But one thing about life is that things don’t always go the way you want. In the end, sports didn’t work out. Rap superstardom didn’t work out. And eventually, I had a wife and kids at home—a family depending on my paycheck. So, like most people in that situation, I went out and worked any job I could get.
I worked in big-box stores and stadiums and factories and distribution centers and warehouses, and at temp jobs you could get only if you showed up at the agency at five in the morning and waited hours, just hoping and praying that someone would send you out to earn a paycheck that day. And if they didn’t, you just went home and looked your wife and kids in the eye. You told them you didn’t make a single dollar that day and hoped and prayed tomorrow would be different. You hoped it would because it
had to be.
It was during this time, somewhere in my mid-twenties, that I got a job as an order selector at a food warehouse. When the orders came in from grocery stores and bodegas, the warehouse supervisor gave them to the selector, whose job it was to go around the big-ass warehouse and gather the food to fulfill them. Grocery stores would place an order with the distributor: fifteen boxes of cat food, ten gallons of milk, thirty-five half gallons, three packs of black beans, twenty-four each, four of red, and so on. It went on and on until there was enough stuff to stock the store.
There are anywhere between sixty and a hundred aisles in these warehouses, and order selectors typically have either a motorized jack or a small forklift, sometimes called a hi-lo, to get around. They ride the lift to whichever aisle has the product they need, hop off, grab the box or boxes—which can be anywhere between ten and sixty pounds—stack them on the pallet, and hop back onto the hi-lo before moving on to the next aisle.
Once the pallet is stacked to a little over six feet tall, you walk around the whole thing, wrapping it up with this big roll of plastic tape, almost like industrial-strength Saran wrap. Then you deliver it to the loading dock, where other workers put it on a truck to be delivered to the customer. That’s the job.
Seems easy enough, right?
But the twist is you have to do it at top speed for the entire eight-hour shift. Your job depends on it. You are responsible for a certain number of orders per hour, and shift supervisors track your productivity down to the minute. Running from aisle to aisle takes time, but what most newbies mess up is that they don’t know how to pack the pallet right the first time. They might throw a box of napkins and a few boxes of chips onto the pallet because those are the closest. Then, fifteen minutes later, they realize that there are two twenty-four-pack boxes of ketchup bottles on the manifest that are way heavier. They can’t put those on top of the napkins, so they have to rearrange the pallet. This rearranging costs time, and believe me when I say that
every second counts. You are being watched. Meanwhile, you are trying to move as quickly as possible, as efficiently as possible, and stack your pallets as perfectly as possible, because the fuller the pallet gets, the more unstable it becomes, making it likely that it will tip over as you turn corners to the next aisle. In some warehouses, you can fix this by wrapping as you go, but in the one where I worked, there was a limit to how much wrapping tape you were given. You had to make it last the entire shift, so you couldn’t wrap as you went. You had to stack perfectly. And if you didn’t, if you dropped all or part of an order, that was a problem. Each pallet contained thousands of dollars’ worth of items, and if you broke anything, you paid for it.
That was your day: run through the aisles, grab the boxes, stack them over your head, do it perfectly, and do it fast, over and over again. If your productivity was below 90 percent, you weren’t eligible for union benefits. And if you weren’t eligible for union benefits, you weren’t eligible for things like paid sick leave and health care for you and your family.
It’s an athletic job. I don’t say that lightly. I played basketball, a little football, and I was the captain of my high school track team. So, believe me when I tell you that picking was real athletic work. Physical. Repetitive. Dangerous. And because there are supervisors watching your every move and a giant clock in your head tracking every moment, it’s also stressful.
I was one of the youngest dudes in there when I started that job. Maybe twenty-four or twenty-five. Most people were in their thirties or forties. I got stuck on the graveyard shift as most rookies do. I would get off at 7:00 a.m. or 8:30 a.m., if I was assigned mandatory overtime. Then I would go home and take the kids to school. I had another job working with my brother at a tile factory during the day. So, after dropping off the kids, I would go to that job, come back home for a short nap, eat dinner, and then head to my night shift at the grocery warehouse. Rinse and repeat. It was a brutal schedule, but we didn’t have any other way to make ends meet.
The environment of the graveyard shift was like nothing I had ever seen, and it wasn’t because I hadn’t been around. I’d been working since I was sixteen. I had been in places that were tough, and places where dudes just couldn’t take it, just quit in the middle of a shift in tears because the work was so hard. That part was wild, but it was not new. I had seen that at FedEx. What was wild at this place was the intensity among the workers and on the floor.
Copyright © 2026 by Chris Smalls. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
