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I’m blaming Nick for this post, which has nothing to do with retirement. Still, I thought you may enjoy hearing about the drinking culture in the beer business, in the 70s.
My first job in the beverage business was as a driver-salesman for Pepsi. After several years I decided to pursue a job selling beer. It was 1977, I was 24 when I applied for a job and was called for an interview at the beer distributor. I arrived for the interview after finishing my Pepsi route, still in my uniform.
I was greeted at the front desk by the operations manager. Once inside his office he explained that the warehouse foreman was retiring, and that a keg of beer had been tapped, and asked if I’d like a glass. Sure, I said, sounds great. It was the first of three beers consumed during the interview. I was hired on the spot.
The first day on the job, I was sent to work on the breaker pile. That’s where we re-packaged beer that came from broken mother cartons. Soon after I started that process, my new supervisor, Larry, approached me. “Dan, we have some errands to run, and I want to see how you handle the truck”.
Off we went. Soon it was time for lunch, and Larry asked me where I’d like to eat. Keep in mind that the prior week I was selling soft drinks. I said “well Larry there’s a McDonald’s over there, and a Burger King down the street”.
Larry cut me off. “Dan, listen, that truck we’re driving is a huge rolling billboard for Stroh’s beer, our customers don’t want to see it sitting at a fast food restaurant”.
So off we went to Shawn’s Back Door, a fine Irish style pub I might add. One sandwich, and five beers later, I assured Larry that I was fine to drive, and we returned to the warehouse.
Our union contract had language regarding screw ups that could get you fired. One of those things was being intoxicated while on duty. That was pretty vague language, and no one that I knew of had ever lost their job for drinking too much.
Eventually the company toughened up the rules. The clarified policy stated that a driver could have a beer at lunch, and another at his final stop. We used to joke that we’d save up all ten beers for our last stop on Friday. Can you imagine a policy like that governing today’s workplace?
Then, while in contract negotiations in 1988, a copy of that policy ended up on the table between “us” and “them”. Neither the company’s attorney nor the union’s staff rep had been aware of the language, and although those two guys hated each other, their eyes met (not in a romantic way) in a rare moment of agreement. The next day, a new company policy banning all drinking on the job went into effect.
Oh, oh, oh, here comes the tie-in to retirement planning. 1988 was also the year that our 401K was negotiated and implemented.
TahDah
From a different type of work environment – I was production editor for medical journals at a Philadelphia publisher in the late 90s. (A bit of trivia – at that time the world center of medical and legal publishing was Philadelphia, although most publishers were owned by Dutch companies. I don’t know if that is still true.)
At any rate, editors who had worked there a bit longer than I recalled fondly earlier years when the custom was to devote Fridays to citation checking – editing lists of credits at the end of each article. It is tedious work. To make the work more palatable, the publisher would bring in kegs of beer. Editors began drinking at lunchtime and continued until the end of the workday, when many of them went together to local bars to continue drinking.
One restriction was that all citation-checking for anesthesiology journals had to be completed during morning hours, before drinking began. Those journals were notoriously tougher to edit than others, although it may just have been that their editors-in-chief were stricter than others.
I don’t think I could edit a medical citation list after a couple of beers, but it seems the older editors were made of much sterner stuff!
Emilie, aside from Johnny Fever’s fictional alcohol test on WKRP in Cincinnati, I’m pretty sure no one can perform better after imbibing. I have dozens of funny stories I could share about working on the beer truck, but at the end of the day, we were lucky that no one died at the hands of a drunken beer truck driver. It was also true for us, that after drinking on the job, drivers would gather at a favorite watering hole to continue the party. Many of us were adversely affected by drinking on the job.
https://www.tiktok.com/@sonicmoreretro/video/7188931853041077510?lang=en
I remember, back in the late 70’s and early 80’s when it was totally acceptable to drink beer at lunch and return to work. I also remember that it came to an end with the advent of substance abuse testing in the workplace.
Dan, do I remember correctly that you’re from Toledo, Ohio?
If so that is interesting because we may have crossed paths on our routes as I am a retired Hostess Cake salesman from Toledo