A day in the life of a shoppie – Deck Sales

If you go on a sailing, generally there is one port of call or area of you cruise which the cruise itinerary is named after.  For instance if you go to the Baltic then St. Petersburg is the port of call and a Panama Canal sailing then the canal is a main point of interest.

To enter the Panama Canal, the ship normally has to pick up a pilot before entering and the pilot guides the ship through the entrance into the Canal.  So the pilot normally embarks the ship early morning.  When I was on Celebrity we had deck sales on the Lido deck with goods and coffee from the Panamanian area.  This stock was delivered to the ship by the pilot at 4am!!  So I had to wake up at 4am to take delivery of said stock.

At around 6.30am all the Shoppies had to carry 10 tables, which we had ordered from house keeping the day before, up the stairs or in the crew lifts from the shopping area to the covered seating areas on the Lido deck.  We then had to go back down the stairs or lift and bring up all the stock to go on the tables, including the stock I received earlier on in the day.  We had to dress the tables all before the majority of the passengers woke up as the ship has now entered into the the main channel of the Panama Canal.

The transit of the canal lasted until about 4pm so we took it in shifts to man the deck sale……oh did I not mention that the shop area was also open from 9am until 11pm ! So we had to have a skeleton staff there as well as staff up on deck. The day got hot and muggy and was quite uncomfortable hence the copious amounts of water on the table.  So the Panama Canal transit was a 19 hour day all in all.  I am not sure if cruise lines still do this nowadays, it is fun looking back but it was a long uncomfortable day in the life of a Shoppie.