Seafood stall clerk - the 30-minute pre-opening walk-through checklist: tanks, ice bed, shellfish troughs, price cards - fix it before the shutters go up

Write a pre-opening walk-through checklist for a seafood stall -
laminated, printed, ticked item by item in the 30 minutes before
opening. Four zones; every line has three fields: what to check /
what counts as wrong / what to do on the spot. The principle:
discovery-to-fix inside one minute per item, with the fix printed
on the sheet - nobody opens a manual at opening time.

1. Live tank zone
- Aerators: bubbles breaking the surface on every tank. A silent
  tank -> swap in the spare airstone first, report the repair
  second - while you wait for the repairman, the tank is dying
- Water color: clear or slightly cloudy is fine; milky, foul, or
  sheets of foam -> change part of the water now, report to the
  supervisor
- Surface-gaspers (fish gulping at the top): a few are normal, a
  crowd is not -> aerator to maximum + net some fish into the
  spare tank to cut density, report
- Dead fish: net every one out; log species and rough count. This
  item gets its own emphasis: a dead fish floating at opening is
  "dead-and-live mixed" evidence laid out for the customer - whether
  the tanks were netted clean this morning matters more than how
  many died overnight

2. Ice bed zone
- Ice: fish mostly buried, no meltwater pooling on the bed. Low
  ice -> top up; pooled water -> bail it out (fish soaking in
  meltwater spoil faster than un-iced fish)
- Bottom-layer check: pick up the fish at the very bottom of the
  bed and look at eyes and gills. The bottom layer holds the
  earliest goods, and the earliest spoiled - sunken eyes or dull
  gills go to the markdown section or write-off
- First-in-first-out: yesterday's leftovers must sit on top and
  forward, today's new goods underneath. Found backwards -> fix
  it on the spot

3. Shellfish trough zone
- Tap test: tap a few at random - ones that stay open or sound
  hollow are dead -> cull them. Dead shellfish never make the
  counter
- Sand-purging trough separate from the selling trough: still
  purging means not for sale yet
- Trough water on the store's own change cadence (cadence set
  in-store; the checklist just carries the tick box)

4. Price cards and counter
- Price cards match this morning's market: yesterday's card with
  today's price is the top source of seafood counter disputes
  (prices move daily; cards move when someone remembers)
- Poor-appearance goods (ice-bared flesh, heavily scaled-loss fish)
  -> move to the markdown section, never padding the full-price
  counter

Bottom line: any item that is "wrong" and that you cannot fix by
the sheet -> call the supervisor before opening. Five minutes late
beats opening with the problem.

Format: one A4 sheet, double-sided, one block per zone, enough row
space to tick; fixes written as the shortest possible imperatives.

Why it is written this way

The core design squeezes "what / what's wrong / what to do" onto one line: a clerk in the pre-opening rush has no time for manuals, and discovery-to-action has to close within a minute. Most walk-through checklists carry only the "what to check" column - anything found wrong still has to be escalated, and it's during those waiting minutes that the customer sees it.

"No dead fish in the tanks" gets singled out because it differs in kind from every other item: not enough ice is a quality problem; a dead fish floating is an evidence problem. A customer photographs it, posts it to the neighborhood group captioned "this stall mixes dead with live," and no explanation survives. Netting the tanks clean before opening defends against public opinion, not against loss.

The bottom-layer check is the item most often skipped, because the counter always looks fresh on top - yesterday's goods lie beneath the handiest spot. Writing "pick up the bottom-most fish" turns first-in-first-out from a slogan into one physical motion: flip the bottom once every morning and spoiled goods cannot hide for eight hours.

The price-card zone sits last but not least: seafood prices move with the market daily, and a stale card doesn't produce "non-compliant labeling" - it produces a customer who picked fish at yesterday's price and pays today's, a dispute in every single transaction. Sharing one sheet with the tank checks is exactly what gives "update the price cards" the same priority as "net out the dead fish."

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