by Tazeen Ahmad
Yours,
A. Cog
One customer who is a friend to Cogs everywhere tells me she witnessed a woman shouting at a checkout girl in the store two weeks ago.
‘Your colleague was asked to close the till and take a trolley upstairs to the staff room and then head off for a break. So she started to do that and this customer just started yelling at her. I couldn’t believe it. The poor girl went red from her toes to her forehead and just caved in and served her. Disgusting behaviour—I can’t believe people can come to a supermarket and talk to staff like that.’
‘It’s one of the perks of the job,’ I tell her.
A man in a neon yellow jacket puts two packets of white Maltesers down on the conveyor belt. ‘Why is maple syrup now £5 a bottle?’ he demands.
‘Is it?’
‘Yes, and it definitely wasn’t that much last time I bought it. What’s going on?’
‘I couldn’t tell you,’ I lie. It’s called inflation, I say silently.
‘We wanted it for pancakes for the kids tomorrow. Well, they’re just going to have Nutella instead.’
Sonia is behind me and I try desperately to listen in but sadly can’t hear her customer service spiel today. She complains frequently that time is dragging. Like all Cogs here, she places her pen in front of her on the till screen where the timer is. It’s at the bottom of the screen, in line with a Cog’s direct eye level, so if there is no pen there, you can’t help but clock-watch. It’s the most painful way to spend your shift.
Magda is also with us on the baskets.
‘I’ve come up with a plan to make the shift go quicker—I’m aiming to serve two hundred customers today.’
‘That’s a tough one. You’re going to have to be super quick with them all to get through that many.’
‘Well, I’ve done a hundred and forty-eight so far, so let’s see.’
She can probably meet this target on baskets because we serve so many customers with just a few bits of shopping. And, besides, she’s given me a new game to play. At that very moment Louisa approaches to pick up the reverse shopping.
‘Yuck! Someone’s left some beef here and it’s been half eaten!’ she announces, bouncing around in mock horror. Customers stare at her stunned—the girl is out of control.
A couple in their fifties are in chatty mood and are only at my till for two minutes. It’s enough for them to tell me, unprompted, what they think about bankers who have lost their fortunes. ‘They expect us to feel sorry for them because they’ve lost billions, when so many of us are losing jobs that only pay us the smaller part of five figures. They’re having a laugh. I’d be very happy with a million pounds, very happy indeed, thank you very much.’
The New Scientist guy is back. He picks up his magazine to show me and grins when I catch his eye.
‘How are you doing?’
‘Rubbish. Hate me job.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I drive a van, do a bit of manual work. Been doing it for a year. It’s boring, the work is shit. I hate it.’
‘But people say you should feel lucky if you have a job right now,’ I say.
‘Probably about as lucky as you. Do you feel lucky?’
‘Best I don’t answer that. Why don’t you do something else?’
‘I’ve done it all—had my own business, was in the army, and for now it’s this. No matter how much I hate it.’
‘It sounds awful, but, hey, whatever happens you’ve always got the New Scientist.’
He grins broadly.
The end of my shift draws near and Betty comes over to tell me relief is on its way. Five minutes pass. Then ten minutes. I’m still serving customers and I can see Betty and Ayesha standing at the till captains’ post. I wave at them and eventually Ayesha walks over.
‘Why haven’t you closed your till?’
‘Because Betty told me relief was on its way.’
‘Oh, right…OK…just…er…close up straight away, darling, all right?’
I walk to the supervisors’ post and give the key back. Ayesha is apologetic and tells me that relief was sent to a trolley till instead. I have again given the supermarket fifteen extra minutes of my time. Based on my experience, it feels like this supermarket alone could be getting several extra hours of unpaid labour from its Cogs every single day. As I leave, I hear a roll call for till-trained staff to head to checkouts. A number of names are called out including Adil. I see him scanning prices on the floor and go over to tease him.
‘Are you pretending to be deaf, Adil?’
‘Pardon? Can’t hear you.’ He grins.
‘Skiving, huh?’
‘Fortunately, I have to finish this, so I have a water-tight excuse.’
Checkout guys hate the tills. I hear that one colleague has just quit after finding himself repeatedly on checkout duty. It’s just not a job for the boys.
Saturday, 21 February 2009
I walk through the double doors and all of my senses are immediately hijacked. Babies are screaming in trolleys that clank loudly as they are wheeled down the aisles. The children, ladies and men’s clothes are a multi-coloured eyesore with huge signs hanging from the ceiling signalling 25 per cent off. There is a scrum of greedy shoppers pushing and shoving, in spite of the biggest economic crisis of our time. I walk past the vegetables and the scent of the spring onion bulbs being loaded on to the shelves fills the air. As I pass the dairy aisle, I’m offered a sample of cheese which I promptly pop into my mouth—it’s so strong my lips start to tingle.
I watch a young couple gush over their baby in the shopping trolley; Dad teases her by taking the dummy out of her mouth and placing it back in again. Mum smiles but tries to draw proceedings to an end. A boy rolls a red nose by my feet and I step over it to avoid trapping his little fingers. A customer is standing right by the entrance to the back of the store engrossed in a newspaper headlining the wedding preparations for a cancer-suffering Jade Goody. I ask him to move aside and he gives me a hostile stare. It’s a typical Saturday afternoon.
I have five minutes before my shift so I stop in the canteen and have a coffee. A group of managers sitting nearby are congratulating another on his newborn baby and exchanging tips on baby-rearing. When I walk across the shop floor to the checkouts, I’m stopped by a woman looking for our make-up range. A moment later I’m stopped again: a mother looking for size-5 Huggies nappies; there are none left on the shelf. ‘Can you check at the back, please?’ she asks. I look around frantically for another assistant and a man suddenly grabs my arm; he wants razors. I ask each one to wait where they are and tell them I’ll be right back. I go to Hayley and tell her I’ll be a few minutes. I then get the customer looking for make-up and lead her to the cosmetics aisle. Next it’s on to razors before hunting down the nappies. It takes a good ten minutes and a lot of searching for products as well as errant customers. Eventually I’m free to get to the tills, and I feel quite stressed. I am someone else’s relief today and I apologise profusely to the Cog on Till 7. She’s now ending her shift an unpaid fifteen minutes late and I’m fuming on her behalf although she is nice enough about it. ‘It’s been a long morning. I’m desperate to get out of here. It’s not your fault —it just happens all the time, I never get off on time. And if you say anything, they’ll just say, “It’s the nature of the beast.”’
I serve a shop-floor assistant I don’t know too well. I’ve seen her around, but her shift pattern is different to mine. She’s worked here nine years. And like others before her, she sighs when I ask her how things have changed. ‘There’s more pressure to perform. We never had observations and assessments before, and now we have them all the time. It’s a bit much when all you want is to come in, do the job and go home.’
Two forty-something sisters with a teenage daughter are speaking fluent French and have a trolley full of clothes with them. Mum and daughter are here on a week-long trip from France. ‘The euro is so strong and your supermarkets are great. Even if it wasn
’t for the weak pound, your supermarkets are still a bargain compared to ours.’ A mum and her heavily pregnant daughter have bought out Sainsbury’s entire baby range in bulk: cotton wool, nappies, wipes, anti-rash cream, baby oil bottles, baby wash, cradle cap cream, gripe water, maternity pads, breast pads, bottles, baby milk.
‘You’ve got every eventuality covered here,’ I tell them.
‘I’m going to have a credit-crunched maternity leave. And the deals are on now, so why not?’ She pauses. ‘I’m not paying for this, though. My mum’s buying this for me now because I’m preparing for not having any money over the next year. I hope my job will still be there in a year, but you never know.’
One woman tells me she’s now started to find the whole shopping experience stressful.
‘From the wandering around looking for products that have moved yet again to the amount I end up spending. I’m really considering shopping online—at least I’ll be able to control how much I spend then and not have to deal with the endless painful searching. The thing is though, I don’t want my daughters to think that food comes from the internet. They need to know that farmers make it and then we select it…’
‘How old are your girls?’
‘Seven and ten. The irony is that they hate shopping here so much they refuse to come with me any more.’
A Greek couple in their late fifties want to use their gift card to pay. I check and there is nothing left on the card.
‘Sorry, you don’t seem to have anything left on the card.’
‘Are you sure? I have lots on there. Check again.’
My screen tells me there is nothing. But I go through the act of checking again out of politeness.
‘No, there is nothing. Sorry.’
‘How can that be? There is definitely something on there—it can’t be nothing.’
I pretend to check again just for the sake of it and then shrug my shoulders.
‘Are you sure you haven’t taken it off just now?’
WHAT???
‘No, I haven’t. If I had, it would have shown on your bill and it hasn’t. You don’t have anything on there, I’m afraid.’
‘Are you sure?’ she asks, looking at me suspiciously.
‘Yes, I’m quite sure,’ I say through gritted teeth.
‘I think you have.’ And she folds her arms.
‘Look—I definitely haven’t. Now, what would you like to do?’
‘Hmm. It was there before we came to your till and it’s not there now.’
‘Look, if you just pay then I’ll be able to show you that you have nothing left.’
They grunt and pay. I print off the gift-card receipt to prove my case. The woman continues to argue but her husband puts his hand on her shoulder and stops her. Eventually they leave.
I’ve started to notice that customers are now buying a lot more fresh vegetables, tinned food and fresh chicken and fish. There are fewer ready meals being bought, although people are buying lots of comfort food like ice cream. Some are still sharing their favourite recipes and the Basics range is starting to really take off. One woman is buying Basic mozzarella in bulk.
‘Wow, you’ve got a lot of this stuff here,’ I say, scanning twenty little packets.
‘Oh yes! I love it. It’s usually so expensive, but the Basics version is half the normal price.’
‘Well, will you come back and tell me if it tastes just as good as the normal one?’
‘Oh, definitely! You’ve got to save every penny in this climate, haven’t you? What with jobs going every day. My best friend works in HR and she has to make fifty people redundant tomorrow and she hasn’t been able to sleep for weeks. There are only four hundred people in the company, so that’s a huge number gone—just like that—’ And she clicks her fingers.
Saturday is also family day at the store—and it’s not just fractious kids piling in. Grandma, grandpa, uncles and aunts are here on an outing. Today I meet four generations of one family—an eighty-something who pays the bill, with her son and grandson-in-law and her great granddaughter aged two. There are also many middle-aged men in the store today so there are pin-pad jokes galore. While all the middle-aged women instinctively hide the pad as they punch in their codes.
Dear Male but for the Most Part Female Customers,
I know banks tell you to protect your pin, so you should. But when you’re in a well-known supermarket, save yourself the trouble. Firstly, I can’t see what your pin number is from where I’m sitting, whether you cover it or not. And even if I could, you do after all take your card away at the end. Your receipt has too little information on it for me to carry out bank fraud on a massive scale. And frankly it makes you look ever so slightly paranoid. Worst of all, it ruins the cosy chat we’ve just had.
And apart from anything else, due to the slump, and your frenzied reaction when I asked you to pay, you’re obviously broke.
Yours,
A. Cog
Connor, a twenty-three-year-old Cog, is sitting three tills down. He’s not allowed to serve his family so his mum and sister come to my till. There are screaming babies and bickering couples all around us. Connor’s mum tells me that when he was a baby he would save his biggest tantrums for when he got to the till. ‘He hated coming to the supermarket as a child and I just find it hysterical that he works here now.’
‘And he still hates it—so that makes it even more hysterical,’ I tell her.
‘Yes. He’s always desperate to get out of here.’ And she whispers, ‘I bet you are, too, today.’
Not as much as the Cog behind me. She’s had a really bad day. Customer after customer has given her a tough time, and she has remained resolutely silent. Her shift finishes at 4.30 and I notice that by the time the sign goes up she still has three customers with mammoth trolleys to serve. She doesn’t leave for another twenty minutes. I resolve not to let this happen today, and at the end of my shift I start telling shoppers I’m closing, even though there is no relief and not a supervisor to be seen. The customers get irate, but I’m in the driving seat and it feels great.
Friday, 27 February 2009
My mother is sick and so there’s no one to look after my kids. I don’t want to let Richard down, but penalty points or no penalty points I have no choice. I call the absentee hotline and end up speaking to him directly; to my great relief he is sympathetic.
Saturday, 28 February 2009
Baskets again and Hayley asks me if everything is OK at home. After Richard, I love her the most. There is generally so little to like here that I no longer feel in halves.
It’s very quiet on baskets today. There are too many of us and too few customers, so I come off to help Rachel stash bulbs on the shelf. We spend a long time staring at tiny numbers on the shelf, reading out barcodes and scanning them with machines. Rachel’s face is lined with the many years she has spent decoding barcodes.
‘I tidied this up this morning, went to help a customer for five minutes and when I came back it’d been turned upside down by shoppers rummaging for a bulb.’
She’s desperate to have a moan about the supervisors on shift today.
‘They’re like a couple of sergeant majors,’ she says as two supervisors pass by.
‘They’re just trying to prove themselves all the time—they’re after their bonuses those two, they are,’ whispers Caroline, a Cog who has just joined us.
‘This isn’t Barings. It’s just a bleeding supermarket.’ Then the conversation, as it often does here, shifts to the time and how many more hours we have to kill before we can go home. Another colleague suddenly appears.
‘Have you lot seen the bloke who filled his trolley to the top with all the 2-for-1 teabags!’ She is livid. ‘I wanted to get a couple of them for my husband, and now they’re all gone.’
‘He’s probably got a restaurant,’ says Caroline.
‘But it’s not on, is it? What about the rest of us? They aren’t all for him. It shouldn’t be allowed.’
‘They sho
uld make it illegal or put a limit on how many you can buy,’ Rachel chimes in. ‘The other day someone did it with the Coke—when they were on 2-for-1. I was well annoyed.’
‘Look! Look! There he is.’
I turn away from my bulbs to see a man with a heaving trolley so full he is struggling to push it and he does indeed have a lot of teabags.
‘And look, he’s got all the Ribena, too. Ooh…I’m fuming, I am. It just isn’t on.’ The assistant walks away, narrowing her eyes at Teabag Man. We turn our attention back to the bulbs and Caroline and Rachel return to grumbling about the bulbs again before Richard interrupts.
‘Oh, Richard, I’m really sorry about yesterday,’ I splutter straight away. ‘I know that must have been a real pain, letting you know a couple of hours before you were expecting me.’
‘Oh, don’t worry—it’s OK. These things happen. Look, can you do some extra shifts next week in exchange for the unpaid leave you wanted?’
‘Er, well…no, I can’t.’
‘Of course you can’t. If your mum is ill, who’s going to look after your kids? Don’t worry, I’ll find someone else.’ And he turns away. There is a little drawer somewhere with my name on it; inside are all the favours that I owe him.
When I’m back at the till, it’s still quiet. There are four of us sitting quietly watching the time pass. So Jenny and I play the age-guessing game—it’s a favourite pastime here. I guess she is twenty-seven and she guesses I am twenty-four. We’re both wrong. I’m older and she is only twenty-two. She’s got a degree in business management but only just passed her exams, so she’s here until she figures out her next move. ‘There’s no work out there, so for now I’m just here.’ Like so many of the other graduates here. We’re both bored and plead silently that passing supervisors will take us off. After months on the tills I’d give my right arm for some reverse shopping. Jenny is asked to come off and she spends the next four hours restocking chocolates and sweets at the tills.