I’ve stood costumed on the side of the road, waving a sign at traffic; I’ve farmed crickets and flipped burgers; I’ve manned the dish pit in a middle school cafeteria, but the most miserable thing I’ve ever done to earn money is move boxes in a supermarket distribution center. This I did with a computer strapped to my wrist, tracking my every move, and urging me to keep pace or else be fired. I managed to survive about two years and then one day during the peak of the pandemic, I pulled into the parking lot, looked at the building, and just couldn’t do it. On a whim, I turned around and drove home, never looking back.
The thing that got me through the ten hour shifts was the silent, inward composition of The Warehouse, my darkly comedic re-imagining of the distribution center as a place the workers never leave. Instead, they sleep in hammocks high in the shelves and drink in a speakeasy beneath the floor; a creature stocks the aisles in the night, converting anything it comes across into a box to be shipped out with all the others; and mgmt is ever looking for ways to increase productivity, often at the expense of their employees' bodies, but when mgmt takes things too far, a desperate escape attempt ensues. . .
The Warehouse descends into a surreal, pulpy adventure leading eventually to the very nightmare at capitalism's core, in this case a temple within a pyramid in a sub-basement of a regional grocery store's distribution center, accessible through a hidden door in mgmt’s office.
I, for one, think it’s pretty good, but no one ever wanted to publish it. So fuck it: it’s a Substack Novel now. One chapter a week. Subscribe to keep up:
In the beginning, there was The Dollar, and it was good. When god came along, he wasn’t nothing: a working boy from a working family, but he pulled himself up by his bootstraps; he took that Dollar and he made all this. Can you believe it? Can you believe how good he is? How good god is? And it is all for sale! It is all for sale for those who can buy it. How good!
-From the creation myth of a group of marooned
box gatherers deep within The Warehouse
Chapter 0101
Word Count: 2805
Time Allotted: 10 Minutes 07 Seconds
Setting: The Warehouse
Down an aisle empty of other selectors, there is a box that has been torn open, and coffee canisters are spilled across the path. At least one has been run over, crushed beneath the immense weight of a Barrett. The roughly ground beans are dark and rich against the concrete floor, aromatic, and positioned in a spill of sunshine coming in through one of the few skylights in The Warehouse. It is a wonderful scene, and Big Bucks takes a moment to marvel at it.
He releases the throttle and lets his Barrett coast to a stop along one side of the aisle and then he steps off to watch as the mound of ground coffee begins to grow until it fills the lonely aisle, blotting out the endless plane of gray with its earthy brown. The overhead lights flicker and then go out. The music from the crackling speakers disappears as well, as do all the other sounds of The Warehouse: distant blaring of Barrett horn, the twisting miles of overhead conveyor belts, the massive air conditioners, and all other distractions fade to be slowly replaced by bird sounds.
The singing is distant at first, uneven chirps, scared and unsure, but as the roof caves in and more sunlight fills The Warehouse, the birds become more numerous. They colonize the high racks, as does the vegetation which is now blooming all around, vining out of the rich compost and climbing the shelving towards the collapsed ceiling some hundred feet up.
Big Bucks gasps as he tilts his head and closes his eyes against the sudden warm glow of sunshine. His hands float up as if they, too, are hungry plants. His fingertips tingle with photosynthetic energy. The endless rows of aisles have become a dense growth of jungle, all feeding on the rich compost beneath his feet, made up not only of the coffee grounds, but of all the foodstuff in The Warehouse, and the endless tons of cardboard that housed it. It has all disintegrated into soil. Decades of rain through the fallen roof have sped along the decomposition, and the rutting of animals has managed to spill all but the canned food to the floor. It is too much a feast for any creature, so the leftovers have become this unbelievable soil for a strange and unknown forest. Coffee grounds, pudding packs, potato chips, cereal, juice boxes, even cheez whiz decompose together, and in it birds and squirrels have shat out indigestible seeds which quickly take root.
Moving cautiously through the scene, Big Bucks feels the weight of this complex network that is so alive all around him. It is both dangerous and intriguing. Vague music drifts in the air, forest pipes composed for some unmade Zelda game, the musicians hidden in a nearby clearing. He imagines satyrs, lovely nymphs, and bearded little gnomes gathering to dance, and wants to join. He abandons his Barrett and proceeds into The Warehouse. What happened to allow it to reach such a state? Only some sort of apocalypse could have created the necessary conditions, so who am I?
A wanderer, come in out of the rain...
A shrill cry startles him as down the aisle there is something barreling towards him. A massive owl swooping just above the ground, its wings extended, beak and eyes fixed on him, the bottomless pit of its throat opening to accommodate his girth…
Beep! Beep! the Barrett announces again, shattering Big Bucks’ day dream. The forest instantly shrivels and the eerie music stops dead. Outdated pop, dad rock, and country return to the airwaves. The soil reverse engineers itself back into nicely packaged dry goods ready to be shipped to supermarkets across the nation.
The machine rattles quickly up the aisle, teetering stack of boxes swaying on its trailing forks. There is an unnerving deadness in the driver’s face as he whizzes through the narrow gap left by Big Bucks’ parked Barrett without slowing. At the end of the long aisle, he turns into the heavy traffic of the main thoroughfare and disappears.
“Go to Slot 133,” the robot voice insists from Big Bucks’ wrist.
“Yeah yeah, I’m going,” he grumbles as he lifts his wrist and scans the barcode at Slot 133.
“Pick five,” it says.
Big Bucks bends and begins to shift five of the boxes from the low slot to the stack he is building on the pallet atop his own Barrett’s forks. They are large but flimsy boxes, filled mostly with air, and will surely collapse if much weight is added atop them, so of course he gets them at the start of an assignment. He stacks all five one-on-top-of-the-other at the center of his pallet and moves to the next pick a few feet down, holding the lever on the side of his Barrett’s handles to shift it into assisted neutral so he can push it along with him. In this way he moves down the aisle, his round stomach gurgling uncomfortably all the while. He releases an almost endless stream of gas, and its lingering smell is the only thing that propels him forward with any pace.
Another selector pulls in behind him and Big Bucks turns to see who it is.
“I wouldn’t ride back there if I were you,” he tells the gloomy youth named Jakko. “Those breakfast tacos are not sitting well with me.”
“Is that what that smell is? I’ve got like fifty picks on this aisle, too,” he whines.
Big Bucks cheers a little at that and lets out a laugh. “Sorry, bud. Blame it on the chorizo.”
“Blame it on the goose,
got you feeling loose.
Blame it on the Patron,
Got you in the zone,
Blame it on the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-chorizo,” another selector sings as he slows to maneuver through the pair before speeding up again, treadless wheels resounding loudly across the beaten floor.
“Hey, that was a pretty good one, Meme!” Big Bucks calls after him then he picks up singing where Meme left off. “Blame it on the ch-ch-ch-ch-ch chorizo,” he drones, punctuating the final word with a foul fart and laughing gleefully at Jakko’s complaints.
The pair continue down the aisle, pushing their Barretts, and stopping every few pick slots to add a box. Jakko is nearing the end of his order and already has two stacks, each surpassing seven feet in height, and weighing in at over a ton. Each new box is lobbed blindly towards the summit, assisted by a little prayer to the box gods.
Identical robot voices direct each of them to their respective picks. Her color is the clunky gray of turn-of-the-millenia Nokias, as is that of all the technology favored by The Warehouse. The bright colors associated with The Company’s brand are reserved for places the customer will actually see.
These wrist-mounted computers, commonly referred to by the selectors as W-MCs, but by The Company simply as Units, connect to The Warehouse’s mainframe via a protected wifi network. The system, named TINA, feeds out assignments all day according to an algorithm that has as many explanations as there are selectors. No one truly knows how it works, or why it sometimes seems to hold a personal grudge against a particular selector that can last for weeks, giving them only the worst assignments in its arsenal.
The W-MC clips onto a velcro-secured wrist strap, and, besides her screen, includes a keypad, and a coiled cord which attaches to a barcode scanner that loops around the wearer’s non-dominant pointer finger. The barcode scanner is activated via a large yellow button on its side that is easily pressed by adjacent thumb. Once scanned, the voice and the screen instruct the selector on how many boxes to select. A double tap of the yellow button signifies completion of task, and the voice instructs the selector to the next pick slot.
When downloaded, each new assignment introduces itself with a short biography that includes the number of boxes, its estimated final volume and whether it will require a single or a double pallet to contain, the amount of time The Company has allotted for completion, and the area of The Warehouse in which the boxes can be found.
When completed, the W-MC calculates the allotted time v. actual time spent working on the assignment, and offers the results as a percentage. The Company requires its selectors to maintain a weekly average of at least 95%, or else risk termination. However, they are willing to pay a small sliding bonus for anything higher than 100.01%.
Big Bucks is coasting along at his usual 110% even with the chorizo bubbling in his stomach. Like almost anything when done often enough, selecting can become second nature. He arrives at designated pick slot, scans, picks up boxes, and adds them to his stack. Despite appearing outwardly sluggish, no movement is wasted, and he rarely breaks a sweat. Whereas, behind him, the less experienced Jakko is flailing about almost frantically, but still struggling to hit his numbers.
Jakko’s order ends with that aisle while Big Bucks’ continues to snake through another dozen, so they part ways with Jakko heading towards the shipping bay to drop off his stacks and download a new assignment. Big Bucks crop dusts his way past struggling newbies, trying and failing to return to his fantasy of the abandoned warehouse. His mind is a blank as he flows through the motions. The stack behind him steadily grows until a knot of traffic stops his progression. Up ahead, a trainee is in near tears as he stands over an aisle-clogging mess. His stack has collapsed and there are cracked bottles of oil, soy sauce, and jars of salsa and pickles shattered and leaking everywhere.
Big Bucks steps off his Barrett and joins the others working in unison to recreate the stack, kicking to the side of the aisle anything containing broken glass. In a fraction of the time it took to build, the stack is recreated. It’s ugly, but it’s standing. Someone throws a protective layer of plastic wrap around it, but still no one can proceed. A sanitation team has appeared to clean what remains. They throw their magic powder atop the mess which soaks up the liquid and oil, but still has to be swept away. Many of those waiting become impatient as the chunk of lost time begins eating into their assignments, but Big Bucks jokes easily with the middle-aged woman sweeping up the saturated powder, distracting her, and slowing her work much to the line of traffic’s annoyance.
“Marie, I’m going to start calling you Malcolm.”
“Why’s that, hon?”
“Because you’re always in the middle of the aisle!”
“Ha ha ha. I’ll show you the middle.”
“Oh, Marie, that’s cold. It’s going to be like that, huh?”
“Life is unfair,” the woman shrugs whimsically and the two laugh as the line builds until it wraps around into the preceding aisle. Someone near the back who can’t even see the hold up is laying on their horn. Finally, everything is cleared away, and the whole machine lurches slowly back into motion.
That evening, after the shift, Big Bucks heads to the cafeteria. Out in the gray courtyard, two food trucks send up plumes of steam in the cool night, but he ignores these and instead goes to a vending machine where he swipes his company card and has the cost of a soda withdrawn from his next paycheck. Then he wanders out into the large mess hall and takes a seat at his usual table across from Arizona, who must have spent his infancy gawking at the saguaro cacti through the window, tall as telephone poles, for he has all but matched their height. He barely fits at the table. His thickly muscled thighs press against the bottom of it and the chair groans under the weight of his bulk.
“No dinner tonight?”
“Naw. Maybe later. Those tacos still have me messed up,” Big Bucks says, taking a sip from the top of his can of store brand lemon-lime soda.
“You got to be careful with those, man,” Arizona laughs as he spreads his dinner before him, all grease, meat, and cheese atop some sort of unleavened bread.
“Yeah, and get a load of what you’re eating.”
“When you start pulling what I pull, you can eat whatever you want, too. What did you finish with today, anyway?”
“110.”
“Clockwork, man,” he laughs, the skin around his lips shining with oil.
“What about you?”
“A 140,” Arizona answers around a half-chewed mouthful.
“Of course.”
“Hey,” he says, recognizing the praise hidden within the sharp tone. “You’ll get there.”
“No. I won’t. I’ve gotten as far as I’m getting. I could hit 120, but I can’t cruise at a 120, and, you know me, I’m all about the cruise.”
“Oh man, what I wouldn’t give to be on a cruise right now,” Arizona dreams.
“I heard that.”
“Really?” Jakko asks skeptically, breaking his silence for the first time since sitting down.
“Hell yeah, man! It’s the perfect vacation. All inclusive, endless drinks, beautiful women in bikinis everywhere you look, and the food is just unbelievable.”
“Sounds like being back in the womb,” Jakko mumbles without looking up from his phone.
“What was that?”
“Nothing,” the sullen boy says, face glazed in mobile light. Arizona stares at him for a moment, shaking his head, but the tension is broken by Big Bucks:
“Being in the womb beats being in The Warehouse.”
“Hell, being in the tomb beats being in The Warehouse,” Arizona agrees.
After a long shift, the warehousers are tired, and talk dies down rather quickly. Most are crowded to one side of the mess hall, pressed as near the windows as possible, trying to get signal on their phones. Big Bucks removes his and leans face first into the screen, disappearing into the cool blue dopamine drip of information overload.
Through the tinted window is the gray courtyard where a pair of food trucks have parked for the day. It is surrounded on three sides by the high, windowless walls of The Warehouse and on the fourth by a large iron gate that only opens to let the food trucks in and out. Beyond the gate, there is a long stretch of concrete squeezed between the interior of the horseshoe-shaped Warehouse, eventually opening up to a parking lot where hundreds of cars are parked. An orange light burns dully through the tinted glass giving the dreary courtyard air a dreamish glaze. A few selectors have found the energy to play basketball on the hoop mounted to one of the walls. The ball thuds off the backboard and drops like a bird suffering cardiac arrest. Smokers are gathered in the covered picnic area, tiny embers and the soft rainbow glow of vapes barely visible through the dark window.
Inside the cafeteria, there are wall-mounted televisions playing on mute. One shows sports highlights, another sitcoms, one gameshows, and the fourth is set to Telemundo. Current Events and Politics are strictly forbidden from the screens, and their mentioning is censored from Warehouse talk. Instead, The Company encourages everyone to join its fantasy sports leagues.
Big Bucks alters his gaze between phone and the familiar rerun of a muted sitcom. He watches as he sips his soda, tasting nothing, feeling bloated in more ways than he can articulate.
“Alright, y’all,” he says when the can is empty. “See you in the morning.”
“Not going to Outside the Box tonight?” Arizona asks.
“Naw, not tonight.”
“Alright. See you in the morning.”
Big Bucks returns to the row of vending machines, orders a Mambo Cinnamon Roll, stuffs it in his pocket, and passes back through the double doors and into The Warehouse proper. He is careful to stay close to the wall and out of the path of the night shift selectors who have taken over.
His hammock is hidden high in the racks of a less used section near the cafeteria. He arrives at the base of the rack as a night selector passes down the aisle in the dark, headlights on his Barrett shining bright. Big Bucks watches as he gathers boxes, moving slowly, stacking completely by feel. After he passes into the next aisle, Big Bucks begins his ascent, pulling himself up through the pallets awaiting their time to be taken down by a lift operator and slotted at ground level for the selectors to harvest.
Twenty, forty, seventy feet up, he climbs before dropping into the hammock hanging there. Safely inside, swinging gently, he digs underneath him for the Mambo Roll, pulls back the thin plastic wrap and takes a bite. He falls asleep with cinnamon glaze in his beard and half the roll resting atop his belly, snoring quite loudly.
[Exit Music]
Really enjoyed this and I'm looking forward to future installments.
I've been on the opposite end of those seven foot pallet stacks at two different grocery jobs and I always wondered about the poor bastards who had to put them together. My total experience working at a warehouse was two or three days, after which, like you, I just couldn't bring myself to go back.