The cashier Rita Kruse works together with her friend Gisela "Gisi" Wiemers, the butcher Berni Stemmer and the apprentice Philip "Didi" Mertens in a branch of the fictional market chain Trispa in Cologne-Nippes. Their only thorn in the flesh: branch manager Achim Schuhmann, an overly precise, downright pedantic man who, despite his own problems with his wife, likes to confront her time and again, and with all kinds of regulations and paragraphs, robs not only Rita of her last nerve. In her private life, Rita has to struggle above all with her husband and two children: motorbike shop owner Horst Kruse is as moody as he is kind-hearted; daughter Sandra, who later emigrates to America, keeps trying to override her mother, and nestling Markus is in the middle of puberty.