PEORIA, Ariz. — In between Cape Cod Baseball League games during the summer of 1988, Alan Zinter wore a red smock and stood at a cash register hardly knowing what to do. It was his first job in the so-called real world — at a Bradlees, a now-defunct chain of Massachusetts discount stores — and he longed to be someplace else.
“That was before you could just scan things,” Zinter recalled. “We had to actually punch in the six-digit SKU number. I was terrified. They trained us there a couple days, and they left it up to us.