Minor Irritants: I have been drafted by my local supermarket

Scott Stinson on making an unplanned, unpaid return to working in a grocery store

Every Christmas, when The Line takes a brief vacation, we like to offer what we call our Gratitude Series — we get some writers we love to share a story of something they’re happy about or grateful for from the past year. It’s a nice corrective to the usual doom-and-gloom. But, as we take a week off to start the summer, to hell with that — for your enjoyment, we’re leaning the opposite way: It’s The Line’s first Minor Irritants Week. Feel our pain. Share our pain. And never fear — The Line will be back next week.

By: Scott Stinson

There is a code that I wish I did not know: 4011. It means, in grocery-speak, bananas.

That is, those four digits are the grocery-store checkout code for everyone’s favourite yellow, curved fruit. Bananas. Four-oh-one-one.

I know this because of my part-time job as a grocery-store checkout clerk. Which I do for free.

To be clear, I am not a volunteer grocery-store clerk, donating my services to Galen Weston or whoever owns the other ones, it’s just that I — which is to say, you, me, all of us — have been drafted into the role of unpaid cashier because these days there is basically no other way to get out of the damn store.

My very first part-time job was at a grocery store, almost 40 years ago. I worked in the meat department, which was not what you’d call a glamour position. The cashiers were a clear notch up, mostly because they didn’t end up smeared with blood and guts. Little did I know that I would join their fancy ranks all this time later. I have come full circle, and I do not like it.

A confession: I didn’t mind the self-checkout when they first started to be introduced. There are times, when you are just purchasing a couple of items, that the ease of a do-it-yourself lane just makes sense. Boop, beep, no waiting behind someone with a teeming grocery cart or that person who has taken a basket with 17 items into the 10-items-or-less lane and has many complicated coupons to redeem. Even now, it’s fine at a drug store, or the mini-mart that now passes for a drug store, because most shoppers are just buying a few things.

But, the grocery store? No thank you. First, there is the volume. No one wants to go through the hassle of emptying a full cart item-by-item over the scanner and onto the little weigh table, stacking various cans, boxes and loose produce items like the world’s most annoying game of Jenga, only to have to do it all in reverse order to get the groceries back into the cart and, hopefully, into the various reusable bags that you remembered to bring.

People who are paid to do this work — you know, cashiers — become quite efficient at it, zipping things along and knowing most of the regular produce codes from memory so they barely miss a beat. I remember the days, not that long ago, where the only challenge at the checkout was being able to put my groceries in bags and bins fast enough to keep up with the lighting-speed of the cashier.

I, however, do not know any of the codes, other than bananas, which, as we have established, is 4011. We get bananas every week. Other produce, we tend to mix it up, for variety. I’m not going to eat green beans every week like some kind of lunatic. And so, every item of produce requires me to both look up the code and try to remember what, exactly, I am buying. Is this onion yellow or white? Is this cilantro or coriander? (Trick question!) Are these apples royal gala or honeycrisp?

Another confession: Sometimes I will look up the code for less-expensive apples even though I know I have selected the Cadillac-priced honeycrisp apples JUST TO FEEL ALIVE. And also because the grocery store is making me do this job for free.

“Wait,” you might be saying at this point: Technically, they are not forcing you into the self-checkout. You could still use the services of a cashier. To which I say: Bah. The one or two cashiers on duty invariably have long lines full of loaded carts. The grocery store is (metaphorically) poking you with a pitchfork in the direction of the self-checkout lane.

I do not have scientific evidence of this fact, but I am fairly certain that it is impossible for a person with more than a few items to get through that self-checkout cleanly. There is bound to be something that doesn’t scan properly, or requires a discount applied, which means you have to stand there, looking plaintive, in hopes that an Actual Human will notice your plight, come over, and solve whatever problem has stalled your progress.

And, of course, the Actual Human is there mostly to make sure that the Unpaid Cashiers are behaving themselves and not simply walking their grocery cart out the door. This is the thing that is wild about the move to mass self-checkouts: stores are introducing a system that seems exceedingly ripe for abuse, and yet they are doing it anyway. Did a few cashiers really cost that much?

I asked a friend who works in the food industry about the self-checkout revolution, and whether the potential for outright theft outweigh the cost-saving measures. He said the stores don’t really worry about the instances of people intentionally not scanning items. He did note, though, that there was a problem with people — and I swear this is the example he used — buying honeycrisp apples and paying for a cheaper kind.

I feel seen.

Scott Stinson is a journalist in suburban Toronto, and he apparently does not lack for potassium.

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