How in depth do you want me to go?

In a lot of ways it's like any other retail job, except instead of putting boxes on shelves you're cutting meat into smaller pieces of meat.

Since you're a little harder to replace you can generally get away with a little bit more. You can goof around, tell inappropriate jokes. There's less turnover. It's harder to get in trouble for, like, saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. For better or worse, the Union favors you and at least at my job the meat department is under a separate, better contract. I make $18/hr which is alright for Ohio without a college degree and good job security.

Everywhere is a little different, but the general workflow looks like - wake up at 3:30 AM, shower, leave home at 3:45 to get into work at 4. Public transportation is not an option that early (buses start at 7 AM) so I drive. Depending on the sales of the store, you might be the only cutter or there might be a team of 3 or so. Unless you work in an exceptionally busy store you'll have one person on beef, one person on grinds and pork, one person on "mainline" (pre-packaged stuff) and value-added product (kabobs, meatballs, sausage, stuffed chicken, bacon, depends on the company and time of year). At very slow (or just penny-pinching) stores they'll have one opener who does beef, a closer who does pork, and hire "clerks" (employees paid less and not trained in knife use or heavy machinery like grinders and saws) to do prepackaged and value added product. Your job is generally to make product to fill the service case and holes in the shelf by some arbitrary time (at my current job it's 10 AM) and then cut some backup. Sales are unpredictable so it's a balancing act between underproduction (leading to product outages) and overproduction (leading to spoilage). At very slow or bad stores they'll just have one meat cutter and either have floaters cover their days off or just have them cut backup and hope for the best.

They do try to use AI to control production but management can never decide whether they want to maximize short-term profit (minimize shrink) or guarantee product availability (increasing shrink) so we generally just ignore the printout we get in the morning telling us what to cut and just follow the literal thousands of years of institutional wisdom on balancing production.

There's a general shift in the industry over the past 20-odd years towards treating meat as a luxury good rather than a staple. Lower-income areas are having their meat counters closed and are increasingly getting rid of in-store butchers for pre-packaged product stocked by clerks; Specialists are being let go and having their regions consolidated; many stores are no longer carrying sub-par offerings (select grade, non-natural, and uncertified meats, less prestigious cuts, etc.) to focus on getting high-paying customers to shell out for prime filet mignon, rib steaks and imported wagyu; natural, organic chicken breasts; and pre-packaged product with a 200% markup. Stores in regions without high-paying customers either go out of business or are only kept around due to deals/for the optics/because (and I know some people might not like hearing this one) a lot of these local grocery chains are locally, family-owned by people who, while they want to make a profit, do actually care about poor communities having affordable food to eat - which is why they lose ground to more corporate, non-union stores like Walmart and Target infiltrating the grocery industry every year.

Meaty.

The working hours must blow though.