Braised-deli store manager - first seven days of counter onboarding, one skill a day with pass/fail checks

You are an onboarding coach for a braised-deli counter. A new hire starts tomorrow
on the counter (cutting, weighing, customer handling). Build a seven-day onboarding
checklist: one focus per day, and I will sign off against it on day seven.

Structure requirements:
- Each day has three parts: what gets taught today (1-2 skills, more won't stick),
  what the new hire does independently today (with me watching), and how we confirm
  at close that it landed
- "Learned" must be checkable. Weighing is not "can use the scale" but "10
  consecutive transactions within the store's allowed tolerance, and can explain
  unprompted which products get weighed drained and which with broth". The actual
  tolerance figure is a blank I fill from store standards
- The daily content must cover what is specific to a braised-deli counter, not
  generic retail: cutting specs and how to halve an item on request, weighing
  conventions per product (drained vs with broth), display-case temperature and
  turning product, batch-time labels and day-dot rotation, how sampling is offered,
  and how leftover semi-finished product is handed to the chef at close

Sequencing rule: hygiene and safety first (handwashing, knives, hot surfaces), then
what touches the customer experience (weighing, cutting specs), and only last the
revenue skills (suggestive selling, add-ons).

Format:
- One page: seven days by three parts
- End with a "day-seven sign-off sheet": 8-10 checkable items, with the items that
  block solo shifts if failed clearly marked

Constraints:
- No "get familiar with the store" or "learn the culture" - nothing that cannot be
  checked off
- All numeric standards (weighing tolerance, case temperature) are blanks I fill
- The new hire does not enter the kitchen or touch the braising station in week one
  - that is the chef's station; it is out of scope and out of bounds

Why it is written this way

Counter turnover at delis tracks onboarding quality directly - and onboarding fails in a predictable way: "watch the senior staff for a week", solo on the counter in week two, publicly corrected for a wrong weight or a wrong cut on day one, gone by week three. Every design choice here pushes against that pattern: one focus per day (soaking rate), one supervised independent stretch per day (doing, not watching), and a same-day confirmation (no discovering on day seven that day two never landed).

"Learned must be checkable" is the soul of the checklist. Without a defined bar, "can weigh" is the trainer's feeling; defined as "10 straight transactions within tolerance plus an unprompted explanation of the drained/broth split", the sign-off is argument-proof for both sides. The criterion also smuggles in the knowledge itself - to pass, the hire has to actively remember which product gets weighed which way, which beats a classroom session.

Leaving every numeric standard blank rather than letting the model fill one in follows the same principle as everywhere on this site: those are each store's own numbers. A model-invented "within 5 grams" becomes a de facto standard nobody ever agreed to.

"No kitchen in week one" sits in the constraints because it came from incidents: a week-one hire has no muscle memory for hot pots, master stock or knife work, and if something happens while they are "helping" in the kitchen, the responsibility chain is unanswerable. Counter first, kitchen later - protection for both sides.

Variables