How Stew Leonard’s Serves 35,000 Grocery Shoppers a Week

It’s easy to take the grocery store for granted. After all, there’s nothing particularly remarkable about the mundane task of picking up our weekly bread, fruit and cereal. Yet each store requires dozens and often hundreds of people to run — to fill the shelves, take inventory, organize displays of canned beans or help a customer locate the vanilla extract. In the latest episode of On the Job, we spent the day with Amy O’Rourke at Stew Leonard’s — a grocery chain in the Northeast that goes out of its way to engage and entertain shoppers. Her goal as assistant seafood manager is not only to ensure that customers can find the freshest clams, shrimp and salmon, but also to make a job that can feel invisible, visible. She accomplishes that with an abundance of energy, an uncannily outgoing personality and occasionally, a lobster suit.