The Greasy Totem Pole and the Beverage Business

Why Work Isn’t Your Family

Author

Samuel Anderson
December 26, 2025

That Greasy Totem Pole Meant Something

As a kid at that aluminum extrusion plant picnic in Rome, Georgia, the details didn’t matter – production lines shut down, families everywhere, grown men slipping off a pole slathered in grease. What landed was the signal: this place is big, it is serious, and yet for one hot July day, the only KPI was how hard people laughed when someone wiped out on the climb.

Those turkey baskets around the holidays were the same message in a different form. Nobody called it “total rewards” or “employee engagement,” but a bird, some groceries, and a sense that someone in the front office saw your electric bill were powerful. It wasn’t luxury; it was acknowledgment: you matter, your family matters, your life outside these walls is real.

How Work Got Shinier and Colder

Modern companies talk a lot more about culture than those old factories ever did. There are slide decks, values posters, videos with upbeat music, and endless phrases about “bringing your whole self to work.” Yet the lived experience for many people is tighter headcount, record profits, and disappearing bonuses – more pressure delivered with nicer fonts.​

In plenty of places, “we’re a family” has become a slogan that asks for loyalty without offering security. You can give a decade to a company, hit your numbers, then watch a leadership change rewrite the story so you’re suddenly “not aligned with the new direction.” The performance didn’t change, the politics did – and politics almost always wins.

My Take: Work Isn’t Family, But Humanity Still Matters

Here’s the opinion piece: work is not, and never will be, your family. That’s not cynical; that’s just naming the relationship accurately so you can navigate it like an adult instead of a dependent. Companies have obligations, employees have obligations, but neither side benefits when we pretend the org chart is a family tree.​

That old picnic was not about pretending the company was your family; it was about recognizing that employees have families and building a bit of shared humanity around that. The greasy totem pole, the sack races, the turkey baskets – those were analog, slightly messy ways of saying: “You’re more than a line item. We see you.”​

The part that’s on you and me now is this:

  • You can build your own “family” in the form of trusted peers, collaborators, and customers.

  • You can choose where your loyalty goes instead of handing it out by default.

  • You can create your own opportunities – side projects, new brands, ventures – so your future doesn’t live on one manager’s mood.

That July day in Rome didn’t teach “companies are family.” It taught boundaries: take the paycheck, enjoy the picnic, but never confuse the two.​

What This Means Inside the Beverage Business

The beverage industry sits at an interesting crossroads: huge global brands with polished employer branding, and scrappy independents running on heart, hustle, and caffeine. In both cases, the same tension exists – a lot of talk about “our people,” not always matched by grounded, tangible care.​

A few concrete ways beverage leaders can bring back humanity without resurrecting 1970:

  • Make culture physical, not just digital
    Host real-world gatherings that aren’t just sales rallies: warehouse cookouts, distributor-and-retailer field days, plant open houses where families are invited. Give people space to see each other without a POS report in front of them.​

  • Shift from perks to signals
    A branded hoodie is fine, but it doesn’t beat predictable scheduling, basic financial stability, and simple, visible gestures of care (holiday boxes, meal credits during peak season, transportation support for late shifts). The signal is: “We understand your real life, not just your login.”​

  • Respect the front line as the core, not the cost
    In beverage, nothing happens until someone sells it, stocks it, merchandises it, or runs the line so the liquid actually shows up in the world. Treating those people as interchangeable parts while talking about “brand love” rings hollow.​

  • Be honest about the relationship
    Drop the “we’re all one big family” script. Say this instead: “We’re a business. We’ll be fair and transparent. We’ll invest in you as long as we’re in it together. And if things change, we’ll treat you like a human on the way out.”

If you touch beverage in any way – founder, distributor, supplier, retailer, marketer – your competitive edge is often the very thing that greasy pole represented: people willing to give a little extra because they feel seen. You can’t mandate that with OKRs; you earn it with how you show up.

Resources if You’re Rethinking Work and Culture

Here are some useful starting points if this hit a nerve for you or your team:

If you’re in a position of leadership in beverage, here’s the filter to use this week: “Is what we’re doing a perk, or a signal?” Perks are forgettable; signals become someone’s Rome, Georgia story thirty years from now.