How Philly-area grocery workers handle the holiday stress — and find joy along the way

Crowds of last-minute shoppers, customers looking for seasonal ingredients, sappy hands from tying Christmas trees to cars, and of course, hours and hours of cheery holiday music playing on a loop.

Such is the life of a grocery worker during the holidays.

“Everyone wants to get, like, the biggest tree on, like, the smallest car,” said Edward Dupree, who has worked at the Center City Whole Foods for over nine years.

Working at a grocery store during the holiday season can be hectic and intense, requiring a lot of patience, he said.

“It’s, I think, definitely under-appreciated,” said Dupree.

Grocery employees from across the region say this time of year brings a surge of stressed shoppers making larger purchases, even in the age of DoorDash, grocery delivery, and curbside pickup.

Customers rush into the store for their last-minute shopping, said Erika Keith, who works at the Fox Street ShopRite in Nicetown. And they’re often hurried as they fill their carts, said Charletta Brown, of the Acme in Trooper, juggling year-end demands at work and pressures at home as they prepare for the holidays.

“Those three days moving into Thanksgiving are just insane,” said Dupree. He said the store starts getting busier in September as students return to the area, and it stays hectic through the end of the year.

Customers aren’t just getting their regular groceries and Christmas trees. They’re looking for specialty seasonal items including cranberries, decorative gourds, chestnuts, eggnog, and black-eyed peas for the New Year.

“Even in spite of the current economy — we do hear a lot that things are a little rougher than they have been in past years — people still want that tradition,” said Brown.

As the holidays approach, the Philadelphia Whole Foods bakery makes hundreds of pies and a slew of custom orders, said baker Jasmine Jones. During the holidays, they said, “the cakes get bigger.”

Many are seeking out pie crusts and fillings, as well as phyllo dough to make hors d’oeuvres, said Brown, of Acme. These freezer items are hidden “way in the back” for most of the year, but they get the star treatment, “front and center” for the holidays.

Keith, of ShopRite, said the holidays bring in more business for the store’s Western Union service, as people send money to loved ones as gifts.

At the Trooper Acme, Brown said, shoppers start looking for Ivins Famous Spiced Wafers starting around Halloween, and as the holiday season progresses, they’re looking for specific nostalgic sweets to fill their candy dishes — minty After Eight chocolates or the multicolored, straw-shaped Plantation hard candies, for example.

“Some people say, ‘We don’t eat them, but we just want them to sit out in the candy dish, because I had that as a kid, and my mother and father always had it out,’” she said.

For Jones, Whole Foods is a second job on weekends. They said they’re “stretched kind of thin” during the holidays as they juggle another full-time job. Jones sometimes volunteers to work extra hours for the money during the holidays, but they don’t like losing the time with loved ones.

And, Jones added, the holiday music is not a perk.

“It kind of makes me angry,” said Jones, adding that they’re “still an overworked worker.”

“It kind of just reminds me that I could be home if you paid me more.”

Dupree, also of Whole Foods, isn’t a fan of the constant seasonal music either.

“If I want to go listen [to the song] ‘This Christmas,’ I’ll listen to it on my own — don’t play it 82 times a day," he said. “It’s a bit intrusive.”

Some customers, for their part, avoid the busiest times at the grocery store.

In Wayne, Lisa Goldschmidt has become dependent on Instacart grocery deliveries most of the year. But when it’s time to shop for her holiday dinners, she makes a couple in-person trips to her local Acme. For her sanity, she keeps to a personal code, she said: “Avoid the weekends and the after-work times when it typically gets crazy.”

Goldschmidt, a 58-year-old attorney who works from home, said she’s fortunate that she can run out midday on weekdays to buy her holiday essentials, which include an expansive antipasto assortment that her family eats on Christmas Eve and the prime rib they make on Christmas Day.

April Beatty, 51, of Broomall, also tries to avoid peak shopping times at her go-to stores — Wegmans, Trader Joe’s, and Gentile’s produce market. She aims to pick up all her groceries at least a couple days before Christmas, and she also buys more this time of year with her two children home from college.

But her job, too, keeps her busy during this season — she works in supply-chain logistics — so shopping the way she prefers, at “off times, just because it’s more efficient,” isn’t always an option.

This year, her Wegmans trip for Thanksgiving happened during a shopping rush: “aisles packed, parking lot packed,” she said. During the holidays, she added, “at least people are polite.”

Customers at Whole Foods are more outgoing during the holidays, said Dupree, part of a kind of jolly Christmas mentality around this time of year.

The days leading up to Thanksgiving are usually the busiest — more so than Christmas — but he didn’t notice quite as much Thanksgiving hustle this year.

“I wonder if this is because, you know, people’s pockets are hurting,” Dupree pondered aloud.

At ShopRite, Keith said, some of the busiest shopping days she recalls are the day before Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve.

“We have our last-minute shoppers — and, you know, I get it. I get the busy life,” she said.

At Acme, Brown sees pressure and stress on some customers.

“Being sympathetic to that, listening to them, is probably half the battle of dealing with any stresses or strain that I might be under — and also what they might be under,” she said.

Brown said she tries to get a head start on her own holiday decorating and planning each year because there isn’t a lot of downtime once the store gets busy.

“I have to manage that time effectively in order to be able to really decompress and enjoy the holidays myself,” she said.

This year, for the first time in a while, she won’t be working on Christmas Eve because it‘s on a Wednesday, her usual day off.

But Brown said she actually loves working Christmas Eve, “because it just seems to me like everybody’s just so happy.”