How skilled are supermarket sushi chefs and are they lonely?
I’ve worked in two pretty different grocery stores in proximity to the sushi people. At both the stores I worked at, the sushi department wasn’t really part of the store proper — I’m not sure what the relationship was. At Store 1, the sushi department was first run by an older married couple, who were pretty skilled, especially given the subpar ingredients they had to work with. They retired, and a younger married couple took over. They were less skilled with the crap ingredients, but very pleasant. Both of these couples were proficient in English, and had other employees in their department. Loneliness and isolation didn’t appear to be issues. At Store 2, another married couple runs the sushi, and employs a couple of other people, who seem to trade off spending a few months at different stores. Only one person is in the department at a time. The couple used to take turns running everything, but now, it’s mostly their employees. The couple shows up to review them occasionally, as do o
I was a supermarket sushi chef for a while. Worked within the supermarket but not for the supermarket. I made minimum wage, which was probably about $3.50 an hour at the time. There were no Japanese people in sight, let alone sushi chefs. None of us were at all skilled. We mostly goofed around, made messes, etc. None of us had any experience, although a few of us had worked in fast food before. Yes, we were often isolated; we shared a back area with the supermarket deli but they looked down on us. We had very little interaction with the customers, and usually for a reason, that being that they liked to try and out-do us with their sushi knowledge and pronunciation. We didn’t know a damn thing about sushi, nor did we care; we were trying to pay our damn rents on $3.50 an hour. When customers came near the counter, we hid in the back or went out for “smoke break”. At the end of the day we always got to pitch hundreds of unsold boxes of sushi etc. in the dumpster as well, but were forbidd
