Beloved Rotterdam cashier is a reluctant retiree

Alsada “Sadie” Phinney is a creature of habit.

She’s lived in the same home since 1980, a one-family dwelling on Poutre Avenue in Rotterdam. She worked as a cashier at the local Price Chopper for 42 years. Since the day she was hired until the day she retired, she happily worked the night shift. And customers who went in for late-night food and beer runs from the 1980s and ’90s remember her just the same as modern-day customers — always with a smile and always humming some tune or other. Though she retired this fall, she can still be seen donning the familiar red Price Chopper shirt.

“Oh I enjoyed it, I really did,” Phinney said of her long tenure, which came to a close this September.

The 89-year-old Rotterdam woman was born in 1925 in a town just outside Oneonta called Maryland. Before her life at Price Chopper, she spent eight years working at a dress factory in Oneonta before transitioning to waitressing.

She was working as a waitress at the Crosstown Diner in Schenectady when her friend, a cashier at what was then called Central Market, gave her an application for a job at the Schenectady-based grocery chain.

“There were no benefits being a waitress, you know?” Phinney recalled. “You didn’t get no vacation, no paid holidays or anything like that. And you didn’t get no raises. So I just got fed up. So I figured, well, let me try a place where I can get some benefits.”

She filled out an application, brought it in to the Altamont Avenue store, where the night cashier had just quit, and was hired full-time on the spot.

That was 1972. One year later, Central Market changed its name to Price Chopper to convey an image as a value grocery store. In 2014, the year Phinney retired, it announced it would change its name again, to Market 32 — an homage to the year the chain was founded and a shift away from an identity focused solely on low prices.

Phinney slept during the day and showed up to work by 11 p.m., working through the night and early morning hours until 7 a.m. For 42 years, she was happy to work that shift, where she became friends with colleagues who would eventually help her through the deaths of her children. She chatted with everyone who came through her line, and over the years, the regulars became friends, too.

“Everybody knows her,” said Dan Garrow, a county employee who lives in Rotterdam and frequents the store. “She is known as the neighborhood grandmother. She hums Christmas music year-round as she’s checking you out and many generations of families have come to know her.”

Phinney recalls her regulars with a smile.

“Everybody knew Sadie,” she said. “The people who came in, I always talked to them and you know, they would just be my friends. I wait on you every day, every day, every day — you gotta come to know me. Sometimes they would see me, maybe at a gas station, maybe at Walmart or something, and they would always recognize me and say hi.”

Not everyone was a friend. One of her proudest moments was an interaction she had with a shoplifter — a man who tried to walk out of the store with a beef sirloin under his coat.

“I said, ‘Come here, what you got under that coat?’ ” she recalled. “It was a whole sirloin. And he gave it to me. He gave me the meat and walked out of the store.”

In February 2012, Phinney fell and fractured her pelvis. She had to take time off of work to heal, but never quite did.

She uses a walker at home, but when she returned to work she used a small shopping cart to lean on instead. She couldn’t lift boxes. She had a hard time scrubbing her station down. If she got down on her knees, she wasn’t getting up again — at least not without someone to help her, she said.

She worked under a number of front-end supervisors after the accident, some of whom were tolerant of her health issues and others who were not, she said. Three months ago, she says her supervisor asked her to retire or face termination. She called the next day, she said, and agreed to retire.

“I still wanted to work, but you know, what are you going to do?” Phinney said. “They tell you to retire or you’re going to be terminated. What would you do? You would retire wouldn’t ya?”

Price Chopper’s parent company, The Golub Corp., has declined to discuss specifics regarding Phinney’s employment or its policy regarding disabilities. But spokeswoman Mona Golub said the store never asked her to retire, and that Phinney must have misunderstood what was said to her.

“It was on the way home from the retirement party that we threw for her at the store a couple weeks ago — our human resources representative for this region drove her home — that she confirmed her desire to follow through on the retirement process and perhaps consider coming back part time in the spring,” Golub wrote in an email.

A Facebook group titled “SAVE Our SADIE” was created in November to celebrate Phinney’s long service, but also to express disappointment with Price Chopper. It has since garnered 400-plus likes, and serves as a virtual space for longtime customers to share their memories of Phinney.

One woman recalled working with Sadie on and off for six years during the 1980s. Another said she always made it a point to check out at Phinney’s register, where she’d be greeted with a smile and a song. One man recalled her as “kind and courteous” and “always smiling and humming a tune.” Another said he noticed she had slowed down some, but “she likes what she does and customers know her better than the store manager.” Others vowed simply to boycott the grocery chain until her return.

Phinney doesn’t have a computer, so she didn’t know about the Facebook group until a former customer recently visited her at home, where balloons from her retirement party sit, nearly deflated, in the living room. He shared with her a printout of all the Facebook comments declaring their support for her, and her heart swelled, she said.

“These people stood up for me,” she said, her finger lingering over names on the pages. “The people stood up for me and Rotterdam stood up for me. My friends took a stand for me.”

Reach Gazette reporter Bethany Bump at 395-3107, [email protected] or @BethanyBump on Twitter.

Categories: Business