Jezebel had an interesting post this weekend about Anna Sam, the author of the book
The Tribulations of a Checkout Girl, who after graduating college returned to her job as a checkout girl to tide her over until she could land a job in publishing.
The post caught my attention because I spent 8 years working as a checkout girl/deli attendant at a mom & pop neighborhood grocery store when I was in high school and college. The job served me well – it forced my shy little bandgeek self to talk to complete strangers and forced me to develop an outgoing, friendly personality.
The post mostly talks about how nasty customers are to checkout girls, blaming the checkers when their coupons expire or when prices don't scan properly. I had one woman ream me out because we refused to discount her purposefully dented cans (it was store policy to send damaged merchandise back to the vendors, and the clanging sounds coming from aisle 3 gave me a pretty good clue that the cans had not arrived damaged) and when I politely offered to get her replacements for the dented cans, she called me a bitch and stomped out of the store, leaving an overflowing cart of groceries for me to return to the shelves.
Working in retail is a particular form of hell, second only to waiting tables, I imagine. You back aches, your feet hurt, the constant drone of the
beep, beep, beep of the scan, the grouchy customers determined to find fault with whatever you're doing. If you've ever seen the movie
Go, those opening scenes of Sarah Polley's character ringing up the harried woman who bitches her out about double coupons and how her bleach is bagged, well, I've been there. I've been the exasperated checkout girl with dead eyes working the double shift and politely asking you between clenched teeth if you want paper or plastic.
But one section of the post caught my eye:
"There are many difficult aspects to being a checkout girl that people probably don't realize; there is a lot of loneliness, stress, sadness, and frustration that comes through the lines, such as seeing an elderly man pay for 15 frozen 50¢ burritos with handfuls of warm change; having to tell a young mother with three sweet-faced children that WIC doesn't cover a specific cereal or type of juice and seeing her face fall as she realizes she has to put things back, and watching people wince as the totals add up on the computer screen. You can feel the stress of your customers; you get a sense of who they are by the items they continually buy, you can tell when your regulars are struggling when their orders go down or when they begin to switch from fancy brands to generics."
This is so true. Working long-term in a grocery store, especially in a non-chain neighborhood store where many people walk as opposed to drive, you quickly begin to develop a relationship with regular customers. You get somewhat intimate glances into their lives. Like the woman who every month would excitedly purchase a pregnancy test to only return sadly a few days later for tampons. Or the woman on WIC who, after 8 months on assistance, triumphantly high-fived me when she bought her first non-WIC order.
The one that sticks out the most in my mind was an elderly gentleman who came into the store nearly everyday. On Tuesdays he would do his regular grocery shopping. Most of it included typical old-man fair: Creamed corn, Rice-a-Roni, low-salt ham, the pre-made pot-pie from the deli and frozen dinners. Every other day of the week he would buy a newspaper, the discouted "meat ends" from the deli, and a can of dog food for his Irish setter, Lady. If I was working, he always came through my line. "How's Lady today?" I would always ask. "Just beautiful," he would always answer, usually following up with an account about how they had gone for a walk or she had seen a squirrel or some such story. "She's a rascal," he would always finish up. I gathered from the amount of food he bought and the way he doted on Lady that he lived alone and that she was his only companion. Early one morning, shortly after the store opened and I stood yawning at my register he entered into my line carrying only a newspaper and a package of meat ends. The synapses in my brain were not yet firing properly so I thoughtlessly asked, "No dog food today?" And with that he burst into tears, hunched over my conveyor belt and began
sobbing. Between tears he managed to get out that he had woke up that morning to discover Lady had died in the middle of the night, while he had been sleeping. "I lost my Lady," he choked out to me. "I just don't know what to do." Neither did I, other than to pat his back and pass him tissues. A few years later he stopped coming into the store altogether, and I wonder if he had died or moved or gone into assisted living. I wish that I had known his name.
We had our regular weirdos, too. The schizophrenic who would come into the store and buy cans of Juicy Juice because they were the only ones "unregulated by the government" and would only pay in $2 bills. The homeless man who wandered into the store and urinated on a display of TastyKakes. The skeezey overweight "fireman" (we later found out he wasn't a fireman at all, just owned a lot of firefighter gear and wore it to impress people) who would come in and leer at all the girls while buying donuts. The religious woman who would pass us
Jack Chick tracts with her money.
Working in the store provided a certain element of fun. A good number of my coworkers were also high school/college students and we spent a good amount of time on the clock dicking around. Races with shopping carts when it got slow, riding on the huge stock conveyor belt in the basement, making out in the milk cooler, water and suds fights in the sink room of the deli.
Best of all were the unpredictable times. Like when late one night lightening struck our transformer and we lost all power, including our back up generators. It wasn't discovered until the morning when the manager went to open and even then power would not be restored for a full 24 hours. It was a financial nightmare for the store – thousands and thousands of dollars of damaged stock that had been unrefrigerated and gone bad. Still it was kind of fun, tooling around the dark store armed with mini flashlights and Polaroid cameras to document the damage for insurance, hurriedly loading salvageable items into the one refrigerated truck we were able to get, dancing to "Car Wash" by Rose Royce blasting from someone's car stereo as we formed a line brigade to begin chucking spoiled food into the dumpsters, the store owner buying us all pizza and beer for our hard work and setting up a store picnic in the middle of the diaper aisle.
Or the time the boiler in the basement began to hum and shake, causing the entire floor to vibrate and a strange dusty smell to emanate from the basement stairs. Just as we were all starting to glance at each other with that,
Do you hear and feel that too? Should we be worried? look, a large BANG caused the entire store to shudder, followed by smoke floating up from the basement and the fire alarms going off. I remember the fear and panic in the manager's eyes as she got on the intercom and said in her best smooth and soothing voice, "Attention all customers, we apologize for the inconvenience but it would appear we have an emergency situation in the store, possibly a fire. Please calmly proceed to the nearest exits. Thank you." And then turning to me, eyes wild and voice shaking, "Get everyone out, get out, get out." Trying to herd customers out the door, most of whom were reluctant to leave because they hadn't finished shopping. "Look," I told a stoner woman insisting on buying cigarettes and Funyuns. "The STORE is on FIRE. You have to leave! NOW. Go to 12th and Maple if you're that desperate!" "I'm not walking all that way!" was her huffy response as she slouched out of the store. Turns out that boiler had actually
exploded, and in the explosion several cardboard boxes caught fire. Luckily, because the boiler was in a fairly isolated corner of the basement (and because the fire department got there in record time) it was mostly just smoke and cosmetic damage. After the fire was put out, we all loitered in the parking lot with the firemen. The owner sent over food and drinks for the firefighters from our sister store across town, and we all pounded icy sodas and stood around with shaky knees trying to figure out what to do next. The only reason this story is fun is because no one was hurt and because it was my last day working in the store. "Well," my manager said as I handed in my apron. "You certainly know how to make an exit."
Labels: Observations, Randoms, teh intrawebs
