by TJ Price
My first job, like so many others before me, was in customer service at a grocery store. I started as a bagger, positioned at the tailboard of a register, waiting for the cashier to slide down the items the customer chose from the store at large, though eventually I moved up to manning the register myself. I learned the PLUs for various items of produce, and even in the intervening twenty-odd years, none of them have changed. It’s stil 4011 for bananas, 4065 for green bell peppers, 4048 for limes, 4664 for tomatoes on the vine. Organic? Toss a 9 on the front of the number, and the price magically raises—but so, too, ostensibly, does the quality of the item.
I remember with great clarity these days, standing behind the belt, greeting each shopper, sending them on their way, besieged by the inane requests and tyrannical behavior of managers. I remember one day in particular, when an elderly woman was checking out at the register next to mine, manned by a tough-as-nails woman named Deb with iron-gray hair and no-nonsense attitude that nonetheless often bore the thin twist of an acidic smile. I liked Deb—she didn’t take shit from anyone, and the customers appreciated her briny, forthright manner too, as well as her brisk pace.
On this day in particular, a man approached the line from behind, licking his lips and looking nervously around. He wore a pair of ratty sweatpants and a long coat, and looked disheveled, but otherwise non-threatening. He greeted Deb, and then the elderly woman in front of him. I didn’t hear how he got her attention—perhaps a dry, “Excuse me, ma’am,”—but the next thing I knew, he’d pulled down the front of his sweatpants and exposed himself to the woman. She gasped in shock, reeling backward. I only caught the briefest glimpse, and a similar horror froze me in place—but Deb didn’t even blink. With one hand, she seized one of the plastic separators from its sill next to the belt and, in one swift motion, smacked the man right in his … let’s call it his “display area.”
“Put that away, you pervert!” Deb shouted over his howl of pain—like a flash, the man was gone in a cartoonish tousle of coat and a shocked, blinking expression. I’ll always remember the look on the elderly woman’s face—a confused mix of horror and admiration—and yet, after her transaction, she hurried out of the store without so much as a thank you to Deb.
Deb was unique—despite her salty attitude and take-no-prisoners approach, she cared about the customers she came to see routinely. She took the time to inquire about family members of the regulars, and remembered the status of their various maladies, but she took no shit from anyone who tried to argue with her, or belittle her. She had a pride I respected. Despite eventually being let go from that particular store (I’d shut my register light off to stand outside and watch an incredible bout of lightning from an oncoming storm riot across the sky, against the strident disbelief of my manager) I would return to the service industry periodically throughout my life, in different forms. After I left college, I found myself in a precarious position and was forced to accept a job at a local supermarket. It felt like going backward—though I’d applied myself diligently to higher education, I had virtually no marketable skills beyond my experience in customer service. Following this, I did a brief stint in the restaurant industry, developed a few addictions, then pierced through that murky veil on the other side with the aid of some anti-depressants and a newfound determination to unscuttle my life.
Still, eventually, I returned—this time, at a Trader Joe’s, for about three years. I gravitated to the beer & wine section—wine, specifically—and discovered that I had a unique ability to communicate with those who knew what they liked, but didn’t have the language to articulate it. Still, at this store, the crew members were assigned functions throughout the departments, and more often than not I manned a register in the front end, diligently punching in the sequences of numbers for produce and scanning the items while making small talk with the shoppers.
The service industry lends itself to bruised egos and slow-simmering resentment, on both sides of the register. Customers—especially these days—grouse repeatedly about prices. Those who are savvy enough (and who have the time) to clip coupons, fan out their neatly-clipped treasures with a sense of triumph—until they are told one has expired, or—through some quirk of the conditions/small print—does not apply to the item they have chosen. Reactions vary from the crestfallen and apologetic to abject fury and outrage. Often, a manager’s presence is demanded. In order to soothe the ego and mitigate the escalating situation, most often the manager will arrive and simply punch in their identifier to discount the twenty-five cents in question.
“It’s not a big deal,” they’ll shrug. “Just twenty-five cents,” they’ll say, except the overwhelming feeling is one of failure. The customer spends the rest of the transaction with a smug smirk on their face, like a toddler who has been mollified by screaming as loud as they can, without end, until their desire has been satisfied by the embarrassed parent.
Inherently, the service industry is broken. It relies on an underpaid and overworked group of people whose typical demographic is the very young, the very old, and those who—like myself—have a lack of marketable skill. Is it any wonder that there is such rapid turnover in the business? Yet the grocery store is one of the only places in society that serves as a cultural and social nexus: we must shop for food. And so, while shopping, we find ourselves in sometimes surprising proximity to our neighbors—even if we do not know they live adjacent to us.
And yet! I have had some of the most rewarding and vibrant interactions of my entire life while working in this field. The pleasure of seeing the same folks on a regular basis, remembering the kind of wine they like to drink—I take great pride in the “service” part of my job, and I can’t explain why it’s something that resonates with me so deeply. (At one point, I was told by an older gentleman: “yours is a servant heart,” a phrase which I marveled at then, and which haunts me to this day, like an unsolved puzzle.)
I could talk for hours about the people I’ve met—the surly, grouchy woman who seemed to always have a chip on her shoulder, until one day I coaxed her to open up to me and she revealed the most beautiful smile. Now, every time I see her, I go out of my way to get the thing I know she needs from the top shelf—the thing that is stocked inconveniently high for her smaller stature—and I am treated to that smile constantly. There’s the woman with whom I’d innocently chatted at checkout regarding an article I’d read recently about the history of the poinsettia: in response, she brought up a children’s book by Tomie di Paola I hadn’t thought of in ages. Shortly after the new year, she surprised me by gifting me a copy of it. Now we embrace when we see one another, and I’ve even met her daughter—recently engaged!—who is seeking a new career in digital marketing and graphic design. I’ve exchanged emails with her, and am currently trying to use my network to assist her in finding progress there.
Then of course, there’s the little girl who lives in the apartments upstairs, all of four years old, a star in the making who once sang me the entire first verse of Aqua’s “Barbie Girl” on her little pretend microphone in the middle of the produce section, and who giggled a riot when I chimed in on the male chorus of “come on Barbie / let’s go Barbie.” Whenever she sees me, she shrieks my name and comes barrelling across the floor—propelled by that mystical energy that children have—before stopping just inches in front of me and looking up tentatively for a hug. She is so little, so full of life and promise, and her parents are so kind. I’d do anything for them—and I’ve only known them through my position as a cashier at a grocery store.
But I can’t go without mentioning the blind woman who comes in with her seeing-eye dog, and needs assistance shopping—the sweetest person I think I’ve met in a long time. With my hand on her shopping cart, I guide her slowly through the aisles as she recalls from a braille-punched card the items she needs. When we’re done, we pack up her shoulder-bags and walk her to the door. Once, I walked all the way home with her, a few blocks away, because the jar of gelato she’d bought the week prior was absolutely impossible to open, even for a sighted person. (A little hot water and a few whacks with the blunt side of a butter knife did the trick.) She doesn’t have any family in the area, and we text one another if we go too long without our paths crossing.
I shudder to think that anyone might consider my actions an extension of the corporate greed behind the store’s existence, that I have bought wholesale into providing a “premier customer experience,” as if I am some kind of paste-faced clown that exists solely to promulgate the faux “philosophies” espoused by the company. No, what I cherish the most about my day job is seeing society in all its aspects. I get to meet people I never would have met otherwise, and I hear the most incredible stories from absolute strangers. I try to pass on this unique joy to my coworkers, too—but without inculcation, like the endless training videos the company makes us watch, performed by actors so shiny they might double as those whose photographs come with a new wallet.
I often think about the day when I eventually must part ways with the company. It’s probably not too long in coming. I am not an easily-managed employee. I buck that which seems inauthentic to me, and routinely criticize the laziness of management. I am often told by customers that I should be the manager, or that the company should “let me run the place,” and I have to laugh and disabuse them of that idea—in fact, if I were to seek promotion, I would likely lose the ability to be as engaged and connected as I have been—the very things they like the most about my being there.
Since the pandemic, the way we shop for groceries has changed. With the fright of contagion and the implementation of social distancing to combat it, the gig economy flourished, taking advantage of the service industry in new ways. This brought a sudden rise of apps like Instacart, which rely on customers placing a virtual order for their comestibles, employing proxy shoppers to navigate the aisles and fill their carts, proceeding to deliver the order to the customer’s door. Of course, Instacart charges far more for the same items, as a convenience fee (and to bolster their profit margin), plus there’s the matter of the gratuity paid to the proxy shopper, which is the way most make the bulk of their money.
I find services like this to be horrifying in the extreme, for a number of reasons. Instacart provides two different methods of shopping-at-a-remove: a customer can either have their order delivered, or they can do a curbside pickup option, which has the proxy shopper simply leave the items at the front of the store, and then the employees of the supermarket are tasked to bring them down to the customer once they arrive. In this latter option, most of the time even the interaction between customer and service industry professional is removed. I have brought orders down to customers waiting in their vehicle while they continue carrying on a conversation via phone, merely pressing a button to lever open their trunk without passing a single word to me in the process.
Not only is this practice dehumanizing to the employee, it is a fundamental further remove from the ancient process of how we gather food. The world seems bent on this reduction of humans in the service industry to function—see also the proliferation of self-checkout, a nightmare in and of itself—as if we have accrued some secret shame regarding the way our natural processes have been warped by technology and convenience, not to mention the capitalistic parasites lurking a few rungs up the corporate ladder.
At this point in history, we are more removed than ever from what we consume—we have virtually no connection whatsoever to the food we eat. It is pre-packaged, pre-labeled, in factories remote from us, and arrives in boxes shoved into the backs of trucks and delivered from warehouses and points distant, to eventually be stacked on shelves in gross quantities. Even the produce we consume originates outside of our country, for the most part, let alone from local farms. The shiny Envy apple (3616) that you picked up from the basket, gleaming and shiny? Product of New Zealand. The Hass avocado (4064) you spent so much time selecting, squeezing each scaly pear with clinical assessment for just the right amount of ripeness? Producto de México. This is made all the more frightening when you consider recent political developments: the implementation of sharply-increased tariffs, spat from the mouths of our highest executive. Now, we seem to be distancing ourselves not only from our actual neighbors, but from those in the global community, too.
This is not to say that all the Instacart shoppers are bad. In fact, many of them are just trying to make a living the best they know how. Some of them are dedicated and considerate and kind, and number among my favorite people to help. Others are rude, pushy, and operate entirely without concern for the greater society around them. One of the shoppers even started sporting a 9mm handgun shoved into the waistband of their designer jeans for a while—which, while understandable, (the gig economy worker is just as vulnerable to predation as anyone else, if not moreso)—the presence of such potential violence in a store where the little girl comes running up for a hug seems entirely anathema to me, nearly boggles the mind when I consider it. Still other shoppers hurl the goods onto the belt as if the Honeycrisp apples (3283) and eggplants (4081) were items of explosive ordnance rather than easily-bruised produce. Some interrupt you mid-stream in assisting another customer, thrusting a phone in your face to demand the location of some unfound product they’ve been tasked with acquiring. They have no compunction for what they’re throwing in the cart—they’re not even using their own money to make the purchase.
It’s not the Instacart shoppers that are the problem. It’s not even the customers—well, not always. Just like the corporation I have to work for, the true issue comes from those who operate at a remove. It’s when we distance ourselves from others that we grow unfeeling: the more time we spend denying the connection we have with those around us, the more we will shrink, wither, and die. Even the chain of managers beyond the store are removed from those who clock in and stand behind the scanner for hours at a time—rules and regulations are passed down from those who never leave the air-conditioned sanctity of their office. Dress codes are implemented and uniform material is selected by those who do not have to collect carts in blistering heat, and any suggestions for improvement are swatted down by the incurious and uncaring personnel on the other side of a computer screen.
I sometimes say—perhaps bearing my head up through a modicum of cringe—that it can be a dark world out there sometimes, and I like to be a bright spot in it. In times of darkness, the eye tends to seek out any point of light, and I hope that my service—however small—ignites some kind of hope, even just for a passing mayfly moment, in the society to which I am connected. To those who deny or refuse this connection—who don’t bother to greet the employee checking them out and thus deny their humanity and reduce them to a function; to those who leave their shopping cart beside the car in the parking lot rather than returning it to the nearest corral—I say, shame on you. You are not only doing the employees a disservice, you’re doing yourself a disservice. You’re inherently darkening a place where light already struggles to make itself known, and if it continues, we will all be so removed from one another that the chasms between us will be irreparable. They say no man is an island, but even if we are, or have become islanded by recent terror and political upheaval, let’s make of ourselves an archipelago, and work on building the connections between us, rather than enhancing the divide.
The era of social distancing is over. Let us now begin the era of social bridging.
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