The Village Idiot: Aisle be seeing you later
There is only one person ahead of me in the “Seven Items or Less” lane — a 60-year-old woman whose items are already past the 18-year-old cashier.
This should be a breeze.
She opens her purse, rummages around for 20 seconds and pulls out a checkbook.
I look around. The woman who had an entire cart full of groceries in the next lane is almost finished. Let me just back out and jump behind her. Before I can move, a man with a full cart and a handful of coupons pulls up to that register.
The lady in front of me is now digging in her purse for a pen, then her reading glasses.
My foot cannot stop tapping. I am reading gum wrapper labels. Why is there so much gum? There must be 50 different brands of gum on this one little rack.
I start flipping through one of the tabloids: “I Had Michael Jackson’s Two-Headed Love Child!”
The woman in my lane now wants to know if she can make the check for $20 more than her bill? Yes. The cashier could not be more bored. This must happen to him all day long. She hands him the check.
I look over in the next lane, the guy with the coupons is leaving, his items bagged and purchased, there are now two more people with full carts in that lane, a woman wearing a blouse with giant orange and pink flowers on it and a mother with what appears to be a 10-year-old child in the children’s seat. This kid is taking up most of the shopping cart. I’ve never seen a child this big in my life. Not fat, just big. He is carrying a silver balloon that says “Happy Third Birthday.” What are they feeding this kid — Miracle-Gro? Nuclear waste? Magic beans? I look to see what else is in their cart. Maybe I could be 8 feet tall if I ate what he ate: vanilla ice cream, loaves of white bread, sugar and milk. So that’s the secret of hugeness — eat nothing but white food.
“There’s mercury in the air in here,” the woman in front of me says to the cashier. “I can tell. The drug dealers put it there.”
The 18-year-old cashier has been carefully trained. The customer is always right. “Yes, ma’am,” he says with a lack of concern and enthusiasm that is absolutely chilling. There was no banter, no cajoling, no human connection whatsoever.
They say that someday all supermarkets will have those do-it-yourself checkout counters, where you swipe your stuff in front of the laser reader, give a machine your credit card and get out. Critics say we will miss that important human interchange, that we will gradually become more disconnected from each other. Exactly how well connected are cashiers and customers these days anyway?
When I was 18, I worked in a supermarket as a cashier. If a woman had told me that there was mercury in the air put there by drug dealers, I would have mouthed off in a second.
“Yes, ma’am, mercury and drug dealers on Aisle 8. There’s a special on them today if you have a coupon.”
I never really bought into that “the customer is always right” theory. I don’t want cashiers and clerks to say “Thank you” to me because I might be the investigator from Grocery Store Central who will fine them if they don’t say “Thank you” and block their chances of ever becoming one of the people who gets to say “Clean up, aisle seven” over the loudspeaker.
The 3-year-old is now waving me goodbye with his free hand. Mercury woman is fumbling, trying to put away her pen. Soon it will be my turn. But I realize I have forgotten to get the fake salt, the very reason for making this dash to the supermarket in the first place. I will have to go get it and stand in line all over again, thank you very much.
(Jim Mullen contributes regularly to Entertainment Weekly, where he can be reached at [email protected].)