by Tazeen Ahmad
‘I’m in the latter category—I used to work in government and am now so depressed by how this recession is turning out that I pore over the papers every morning. It drives my husband crazy. But that’s what retired people do—long for the life they used to have.’
I’d love to know more about her, but there are other customers to serve. Behind her is a bubbly woman with tumbling dark curls. As we chat about schools, our young kids and family life, she puts back a couple of items. Three-quarters of the way through scanning her stuff, she asks me for a subtotal.
‘Um…it’s £65.36,’ I tell her casually.
She freezes on the spot and exclaims, ‘You’re joking!’
‘Um, no…’
‘No way…’ she utters in a half-whisper, half-gasp. She seems to be going into an anaphylactic shock. The customers behind her have stopped loading their shopping and are watching intently. Her reaction is a little distressing and she needs to come to her senses.
‘How much did you want to spend?’ I say quietly, leaning towards her.
‘Sixty pounds, maximum,’ she manages to reply.
‘What do you want to do?’ I ask. She stares back at me, blank.
‘Do you want to leave the rest of the shop?’ I whisper.
‘Yes, yes please,’ she whispers back. ‘I’m so embarrassed; I just can’t believe it’s that much.’
‘Don’t worry about it,’ I say, taking stuff off the belt. ‘Do you want to put some other things back, you know, from the stuff I’ve already scanned?’ l say, indicating her packed shopping. She hesitates. She wants to, but the ogling crowd by the till are making her feel like a freak show.
‘Yes,’ she finally braves. She gives me the fresh chicken and her window-cleaner spray and it takes it down to just over £60. She also has a £6-off-a-£60-shop voucher and I put it through. She apologises fervently. I pass her change over quickly.
I get another sixty-second recipe from a customer today.
Roasted chicken pieces marinated in Mediterranean cuisine herbs (i.e. Italian herbs, mixed spice and garlic). Pop in the oven for thirty minutes. Et voilá.
A group of grown-up girls arrives up at my till and argues loudly about how the bill should be split. They ask me to check if the Persil tablets are £7 for fifty-six tablets. With the help of a supervisor we establish that there are fifty-six tablets in each pack and, no, it’s not two packets for that price. They put those back. They shout ‘you charged that twice’ just as I realise this myself. Their vouchers are out of date. They run around the till looking for something small to buy to bring the total over £20. They present yet another voucher. They argue again over who pays and who should take the change. By the time they leave, I feel worn out.
I serve a middle-aged man with his wife in tow who thinks he’s the first person ever to allude to pin-pad innuendo. ‘Ha ha ha, that’s so funny,’ I say. ‘And do you know your wife’s giant white baps cost 65 pence?’ I add, startling both myself and him.
Today there are posters hanging from the ceiling that have big baskets full of Sainsbury’s own-brand goods. Switch and Save it tells the recession-struck shoppers who walk past semicomatose, too busy splurging to notice any proposition that may help them save money.
Dear Customer,
Hard times call for hard choices. Will it be the Basics pizza bases or the frozen ready-made ones? Will it be the six bottles of wine or a basket of necessities? Because you can’t keep buying both. If you don’t want to be paying the equivalent of your mortgage every month—and, let’s face it, many of you are—you need to stop. Right now. A family of four, by my reckoning, are spending between £400 and £600 a month. Does that hurt? It hurts me to say it. Calm down when you’re shopping. Take a deep breath. You’re not playing Supermarket Sweep.
Here is your sixty-second master-class in how to shop. Check the prices. And if they’re not there, ask someone to check for you. Walk into the store and walk towards the food. You are here to buy food, not DVDs/toys/clothes/random household paraphernalia. Give the goods stocked at the entrance a wide berth. Forgo luxuries, stick to the basics. Make a list and stick to it. Take your trolley to the till and ask the Cog to tell you when it gets close to your upper limit. She’s on your side, trust me.
Yours,
A. Cog
PS. If you’re brave enough, take a calculator. You might get stared at, but it’ll be mostly appreciative glances.
A man who doesn’t know how to cook buys chicken with the skin on. He asks me what he should do with it.
‘What do you normally do?’
‘I just boil it, grill it and salt it.’
‘That sounds dull. Do the boiling bit. Then try marinating it with some herbs and spices—pick anything you like, but you could try paprika, garlic, turmeric, salt and pepper, and maybe some thyme and a little bit of rosemary and sage. And then put it under the grill.’
‘Sounds yum. Thanks, Nigella.’
I serve an ex-Cog who worked in this store nine years ago for about three years. She’s shopping with her mum and I’m fishing for some stories. ‘The worst part of the job back then was the supervisors and the manager. If I was even a minute late, I’d get into deep trouble—and then I’d always finish late, which always infuriated me. And then, of course, there were the customers,’ she says, looking at me meaningfully.
‘I hear you.’
‘So they haven’t changed then? Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ She picks up her scanned packet of croissants and pauses. ‘It was always tiny things would set them off, like if I asked them for their Nectar card twice, you know, by mistake. Or if an item came up higher than they thought. By the time I left, I was desperate to get out of here.’
One customer’s bill comes to £99.66.
‘Oh, isn’t that a funny number?’ she starts to tell me. ‘I went to this party once at 9.19 p.m. on the 19th of the 9th 1999. We all had to wear black and white clothes and eat red and green food. It was one of the strangest nights of my life.’
One of my regular customers is a teacher in a secondary school and she complains about how unruly secondary school children are becoming. ‘When they get to senior school, singlesex environments are best for both sexes. Although, if you ask me, I much prefer teaching teenage boys to teenage girls. You wouldn’t believe what girls are like these days.’
I meet such a girl not long after. She’s no more than eleven and wearing her hair high in a ponytail, a lot of clunky jewellery and a white hoodie with ‘star-maker’ in gold letters emblazoned on the back. Her teeny little skirt stops just above the level of acceptability.
‘Oh, come on, Mum.’
‘NO.’
‘Please, Mum, everyone else is shaving them now.’
‘I don’t care—you’re too young. And anyway, you don’t have anything there.’
‘OK then, can I wax them?’
‘NO!’ says Mum, rolling her eyes.
‘Thanks a lot, Mum, I’ll just go to school with my Hairy Biker legs then, shall I?’ And she turns her back to the till, folds her arms and actually curls her lower lip. She remains frozen in this monumental strop until I finish up with Mum five minutes later.
More normal-sized toddlers are being toddlers and having tantrums in every corner. Old people are being old people and grumbling about it at every till. An elderly couple have a full-on tiff about their packing. They argue about the biscuits, the bottles and the bread. ‘You’ll squash it all, you don’t think logically when you pack.’
My hands get bloody from a joint of meat I scan and I ask Ayesha if I can wash my hands. She’s none too pleased. ‘I’m not supposed to take over if you are in the middle of a transaction.’ My hands have a distinct and rather disgusting browny-red smudge on them. She sees that I may retch and so reluctantly takes over. I run to the toilets, scrub them down and race back to the till. The usual end-of-transaction queries about missing Nectar cards continue. Even in polite society it appears more fitting to interrogate the Cog before
checking own belongings.
I get taken off the tills for my last hour and refill the ‘Try something new today’ recipe booklets. They have been disappearing fast so I open several new boxes to replace them. I refill the booklets at a freshly captured Connor’s till.
‘I haven’t found a good enough hiding place yet,’ he tells me.
‘Try diving into the freezers under the frozen fish—they won’t think to look there,’ I advise wisely.
‘Been there, done that.’
‘You need to hide where the others do—where do Phillipe, Jeremy and David hide?’
‘They don’t hide, they vanish into the thin air that is their other jobs. My main thing here is checkouts.’
We’re interrupted by a customer who shouts ‘FREE?’ at Connor. It’s more a command than a question, so I leave.
I walk past Nelly on baskets. ‘You’re on baskets again—are you ALWAYS there?’
‘You noticed then?’ she says testily.
I pass Magda and she jibes: ‘Taken off because you’re not up to the standard of customer service required, huh?’
A Cog nearby has finished her shift but no one has closed her till. She continues to quietly serve customers but it doesn’t sit well with me. I march straight up to the supervisors and remind them it’s the end of her shift.
At the end of my shift I take my shopping to Jeremy, who has a lot of theories. After almost a decade here he’s seen the full gamut of changes in retail and he talks about deflation and how ‘people will start buying their food shopping on credit soon’. He also tells me male colleagues only make it to checkout if they excelled in their previous role. He rocked in the freezer sections, so here he is.
Saturday, 28 March 2009
I decide to count the exact number of customers I serve today—I’ve just been making rough estimates for weeks and it will help pass the time. I’m serving one of my first customers when Susie comes over with a price enquiry. The customer I’m serving is struggling with the pin-pad so I’ve swiped her card on my till. ‘Can you take your card out?’ I ask absentmindedly.
‘No, because you have it,’ says the customer. And then Susie and the customer laugh at me. Not with me—AT me. That’s important.
One customer has left his ailing wife in the car. ‘And because of that not only have I saved my ears from all her moaning, I’ve saved money and time. Twenty minutes flat, it took me.’
Anya Hindmarch’s ‘I’m Not a Plastic Bag’ is yesterday’s news. Today a customer is showing off her large Missoni-style bags imported from a Mauritian supermarket for 25p apiece. ‘I’m the envy of all my friends. I keep getting asked why I didn’t buy dozens. But I did—just not for anyone else.’ She giggles.
‘Mother, how did we manage to spend that?’ asks her eldest daughter breathlessly as her mum hands over a cool £251. ‘Mother’ blames the youngest for buying a few pencil cases and T-shirts. Taking a quick look at the bill, I can see most of it is actually ‘Mother’s’ doing.
The scanner is playing up again and does this just as a woman who definitely does not need to add to the extra inches on her hips tries purchasing a particularly creamy carrot cake. The barcode is at the bottom of the pack and I have to turn it on its side to scan it.
‘Just leave it.’
‘I have to scan it, I’m afraid, and it’s not scanning from this angle.’
‘You’ll spoil it.’
‘I’m trying to make sure I don’t.’
‘Leave it.’
‘I’ll try typing in the barcode, but I still need to turn it on its side to read it.’
‘No! Leave it.’
‘If I don’t scan it, you do know you can’t have it?’
‘Just leave it.’
‘You want to leave it then? Are you sure?’
It suddenly scans.
‘Well, now you’ve spoilt it.’
I haven’t spoilt it.
‘It’s only the tiniest bit of cream at the top of the pack,’ I plead. And there is just a bare smidgen of cream pecking the inside of the plastic lid. I leave it on the belt for her to stare at for a while.
‘Give me another bag!’ she snaps, just to have something to snap at. She takes the cake and neither of us says goodbye.
One of my regular customers is suffering another one of her migraines. She seems to get them every time she comes to the store. She’s been asking my advice (it’s that medical student thing again) so I suggest yoga, stretches, fresh air and massages. ‘It happens as many as three times a week now and I’ve got to be careful about which painkillers I take because of my epilepsy.’
‘You’ve got to get it checked out properly,’ I insist.
You don’t need to be a doctor to know her lifestyle is also a contributing factor. She teaches at a school where she deals with autistic children. She has three kids aged sixteen, thirteen and eleven, of whom the two girls are driving her around the bend. She tells me about the latest drama involving her teenage daughters and I try to reassure her that, once they get out the other side, they’ll be OK. She was frazzled and tense on arrival and is smiling broadly by the time she’s paid up. My work with her is done.
One man puts all the scanned shopping back into his trolley—despite having two large bags with him.
‘Sorry, can I ask—why aren’t you packing it all in the bags?’ I enquire.
‘It’s quicker. I know what it’s like to be waiting in a queue. I get fed up if someone is spending their time packing. I’ll just do it when I get to the car.’ He’s probably pulling his hair out when he’s stuck behind a customer being chatted up by a Cog.
I have my tea break and as I head back to the floor I see a tearful supervisor saying, ‘I just don’t want to do it.’ A distraught-looking manager follows close behind. It’s unnerving watching her cry because she’s always so together and in control. I learn later that he wants her to start taking on an extra task she’s not keen on—observing the customer service of the Cogs on duty. I don’t blame her, it’s not a job that makes any of the supervisors popular.
I serve a customer based at head office who tells me she’s witnessed Sainsbury’s emphasis on customer service for as long as she’s been with the company—at least five years. Her husband joins in. ‘It’s well worth it because the whole supermarket experience at Sainsbury’s is head and shoulders above Tesco.’ She adds, ‘They’re going to hire lots more shop-floor staff now too, because they’ve just got rid of a raft of middle-management jobs.’
‘So they’ve got rid of expensive employees so they can hire cheaper ones?’
‘NO. NO. It was just taking too much red tape to get the littlest thing done. Now things will be a lot better, simpler.’
A woman with dyed orange hair, blood-red lippie and thick kohl lining her eyes is buying an expensive anti-wrinkle cream. I tell her gently that I don’t believe they really work. ‘Oh, I know that. It just makes me feel better and it feels nice—and when you see the gorgeous skin that Hollywood stars have, it does make you reach for the creams.’
‘But you DO know that it’s not the cream that’s done that—it’s probably the round-the-clock nutritionists, expensive facials and cosmetic surgery on tap.’ I say.
‘Oh yes—some of them do look dreadful though, don’t they?’
We list the names of the worst faces in Hollywood and I suddenly notice that husband looks quite left out—so I draw him in playfully.
‘So what do you think, should a woman age gracefully or get work done?’
‘Oh, get work done, definitely.’ He grins and I laugh. But his wife does neither. ‘You can talk—you need work,’ she says, glowering at him. My grin gets uncomfortable. He says nothing. ‘I could make a really long list of what you should get done.’ She’s really scowling now. He distracts himself with rearranging the shopping and I scan more quickly. ‘In fact, you should get yourself down to the plastic surgeon, right now,’ she finishes.
More trouble onboard the love boat when another
couple arrive at my till. The wife asks me to do a sub-total of the first ten items. They include merlot wine, chocolate mousse, apple-and-blackberry pie and three doughnut rings. It comes to £13.28. She whispers to me: ‘Don’t say anything, just continue.’ Husband is at the other end of the till loading on the rest of the shopping. When he finishes he comes over. ‘Well, how much was your stuff?’ She smiles guiltily but pretends not to hear him. ‘She spends a fortune when she comes shopping. When I come alone it takes forty minutes to shop, but when SHE comes alone she spends two hours! So now she gets her bits separately and I pay for the stuff that’s actually ON the shopping list.’ He tells me he’s been compiling a shopping list ever since the credit crunch kicked in and following it religiously. ‘We only replace what we eat now and don’t buy anything extra unless we’ve run out—but if I let her shop we throw lots away. She really needs to eat before she comes out too. ‘Their shopping comes to £52.70. ‘If I hadn’t bought the extra stuff it would have been thirty something, wouldn’t it?’ the wife says pensively.
Rebecca and I drive home together. ‘This customer actually asked me for a discount today. And she was one 100 per cent serious. I was like, “Um, madam, I’m not quite sure how you expect me to do that?” And do you know what she said? “Well, what about your discount card—can’t you use that?” Can you believe the gall?’ Rebecca then tells me about her soap-opera moment. ‘This family had a massive argument RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME. After which the daughter and her boyfriend just stormed off, leaving Mum to pay.’
‘How embarrassing…’
‘Especially as Mum then started going on and on about the dodgy boyfriend and how he sponges off them both. And all I was thinking is, this isn’t the Jeremy Kyle Show, love—it’s a supermarket—have some dignity.’
Friday, 3 April 2009
I say a quick hello to Lesley and head down. The cleaner is at the bottom of the stairs wiping up a big oil spillage by the discounted goods. OK, so there’s a job I’m glad I’m not doing. Hayley is on duty and gives me a big hello.