The Mastery of Time Balancing = Man episode 4 featuring Elots

Nobody tells you what the vending route is really like until you're standing on the back of a trailer in 111-degree heat, sweating like James Brown, training a new guy who's looking at you like you're insane. That's the honest version. The glamorous version is what people see from the outside: a guy rolling carts and stacking shelves. Ten-plus stores a day, though? That's a different story entirely. Dre and his brother, catching up on episode four of Palmetto Pour Decisions, know this grind from the inside. Both work outside. Both have watched new hires come in cocky and walk off the job by end of week. "They think it's gonna be the same," one of them says about guys who transfer over from sitting jobs. "They come do some work and then they be like, man, I don't know what I'm doing." The turnover is constant. The ones who stick around earn a kind of quiet respect from each other that doesn't need much explaining. "I seen people come and go. Come and go." Dre has been in the business since he was 23. He's turning 32 in a couple of months. The muscle memory is deep enough now that he knocked out a hundred-plus cases at one stop in under an hour, texted his merchandiser at 11:30, and got the reply: "Oh shit." The conversation keeps circling back to one principle: knowing your limit and respecting it. That applies to jobs, drinks, food, everything. On the job front, both of them took the hard road before landing where they are now. Eli was being groomed for store manager at a previous gig, managing an Augusta location before the title ever came through officially. When the promise didn't get fulfilled, he didn't blow up about it. He just moved. Stepped back to part-time, picked up a fast-food job on the side, enrolled in school, and ground through all three at once. Rest is mandatory. You can hustle two jobs and school at the same time, but you still have to sleep. He's clear-eyed about what that season cost and what it built. "You got to make it some kind of way," he says, but the caveat is immediate: you need your rest, because without it, nothing else holds together. The Beer Business Is Changing Both of them have watched the beverage industry shift in real time from the inside. When the brother now doing vending first started driving routes, little country stores out in the woods were moving 400 cases of beer on a weekend. Peach pickers pulling up in old school buses, paying cash, clearing out the cooler. That era is over. Younger drinkers moved to THC seltzers and hard alternatives. The Budweiser crowd aged out. Neither of them is mourning it, exactly. Andre switched off Budweiser during the pandemic because it was hitting too hard. "I gotta go to something light," he says. Bud Light didn't cut it either — "Bud Light taste like watered-down Budweiser." He landed on Ultra and stayed there. Cold, clean, lets you have a couple more without your head pounding the next morning. That's the whole strategy. The hard liquor stories are better, though. There's the Hennessy era — smooth enough going down that it became the default for years, enough volume consumed that "Henny owe me a check." There's the Loon (or Luna, whatever that joint was called) that he describes as motorcycle fluid, the bottle that sent him walking across a yard that felt like a treadmill, straight to the toilet, then straight to the phone to call his supervisor and tell him, without any embellishment, that he was still drunk and physically could not come in. The supervisor respected the honesty. So did we. The real tequila, though. Not American tequila. Real tequila from Mexico. One shot from his coworker's Mexican restaurant connection and he was done for the night. His boy took two shots and needed help getting home. "We been drinking watered-down for so long," he says. "They done showed us what it is." Fatherhood Flips the Script The sharpest turn in the conversation happens when kids come up. Both of them are fathers now, and both of them describe the same shift: becoming a dad didn't just add responsibility, it pulled out something that wasn't there before. Having kids brings it out of you, man. Especially when your first child is a girl. Eli’s daughter has taken to quoting scripture at exactly the right moments — something she's picked up from watching him read the Bible, something she's also landing on her own. Her auntie noticed it before he could fully explain it. The baby is doing the same thing in his own way, already trying to stand up, already figuring out that crying works better when someone's watching. "Babies, old folks, they animals," he says. "They be tuned in better than we are. They still spiritually closer." That thread connects back to their own father, Pop. Eli didn't really get close to him until he became a man himself. There's a moment he brings up where Pop, being genuinely honest, told him: "I thought you was a weird nigga." Eli says it had him dead because Pop wasn't joking. It was real.