The Checkout Girl

by Tazeen Ahmad

  I pick up my own Easter eggs on the way home and take them to Michelle’s till. She’s banging on about her favourite subject—probation. The fact that someone so obsessed with our trial period is still on a trial period is an unbearable twist of fate. ‘I just hate the uncertainty. The hours are better, but I just want to know if I’m staying on. I got a green recently, so I hope so. But I just find it stressful.’

  I hope she gets to stay on—it clearly means a lot to her.

  On the way home Rebecca and I swap horror stories about the amounts people are spending. I’ve become obsessed with the recession myself—working behind the checkout, hearing other people’s financial woes, watching their horrendous spending habits is doing me no good at all.

  Friday, 17 April 2009

  It’s chock-a-block and chaos reigns. Screaming babies, yelling toddlers, mums on the edge of a breakdown shouting orders at their offspring:

  ‘NOOO, NO CHOCOLATE!’ ‘GET OVER HERE.’ ‘WHERE ARE YOU???’ Child-free customers can barely hide their disdain. The queues are heaving. To add insult to injury, it’s the lunch hour and I’m on baskets. I serve a woman who works at a distributor’s around the corner—they specialise in ethnic foods. ‘Business is good. But you know, food always does well in a recession—a bit like here. People have to eat and they are more likely to eat in and cook right now.’

  A customer who was made redundant a few months ago passes by. Last time I spoke to him he was getting a little work from an agency. I will him to come to my till. About ten minutes later he goes to another checkout—leaving me dangling in mid-air like one of the blousons I’ve just scanned. Every story needs a beginning and an end—but the endings here often vanish into thin air, like an unfinished book left behind on a train.

  People are presenting their bonus point vouchers and prepared to put up a fight for every last point. A customer who wants to use a voucher so she can get 100 Nectar points (the equivalent of 50p) needs to spend another 30p on either bread, bakery or cake. She only has toffee pudding and bagels. Off she goes towards the bakery, leaving her husband behind at my checkout. I send the customers behind them to other tills. He kills time by discussing a front-page story about Gordon Ramsay with me. She’s gone for a good ten minutes and comes back clutching two crusty white rolls. I put them through and then say mischievously, ‘I’m afraid you’ve not got enough yet.’

  ‘You are kidding!’ she shrieks. Because my courage has a limit, I quit while I’m ahead. Her husband thinks it’s hilarious.

  An Italian woman asks me to check her Nectar points. I tell her she has £5 worth.

  ‘Do you want me to take it off?’

  ‘I have more. Check again,’ she orders.

  I check again. ‘You have £5, I’m afraid.’

  ‘That’s not right. I have more.’

  ‘You probably do have more, but for reasons I can’t explain it’s telling me you only have £5 worth. Do you want me to take it off?’

  She’s angry. I wait a few beats.

  ‘Would you like me to take it off?’

  ‘I have more points than that,’ she frowns. ‘Something is wrong.’

  ‘Yes, the thing is, we aren’t Nectar. And I don’t have the experience to tell you why that may be the case.’ I haven’t had any training on Nectar points so can’t tell her what is going on. Sometimes people can’t redeem points if they don’t normally shop in that store, sometimes the points are all there but the card is blocked. Usually, though, I just don’t know. And anyway, she is holding up the queue.

  ‘Would you like me to take it off or leave it?’ More silence and a frown.

  ‘Should I just leave it on then?’

  Nothing again and now I’m out of patience.

  ‘Do you want to go around to customer service and see if they can find out why? It’s just there.’ I point to the desk behind me.

  ‘Hmm. Something is wrong. I have about £20. You’ve got it wrong.’

  Enough is enough.

  ‘Well, I can’t do anything else here. I can either take it off or leave it on—please tell me what you’d like me to do?’

  There’s more hostile staring, some steely contemplation and then…‘Leave it, please.’ I print off the receipt and it indicates that she definitely has more—about £20—but my till only tells me what my till chooses to tell me and so my hands are tied. I start to point this out gently but she grabs the receipt and storms off. As I serve the next customer I can hear her at customer service.

  ‘SOMETHING IS WRONG—WHERE ARE ALL MY BLOODY POINTS?’

  Diana is with us on the baskets and fiddles with her hair a lot today. ‘I’m bored,’ she says repeatedly. Barbara walks by.

  ‘I’m really bored,’ says Diana. ‘Can I come off for a bit?’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ says Barbara. ‘But those two are going soon, so you’ll have to go back on again after a while.’ And Diana locks her till and walks away to shop-floor freedom. The two older Cogs left behind mutter to each other. ‘If we said we were bored, we wouldn’t just get to come off…’

  ‘No, we’d get our knuckles rapped and then get given a spray and a cloth to get scrubbing.’

  Granddad is in the queue with two teenagers. The woman in front of him offers to drop back in the queue. She has her reasons. She leaves her basket to hold her place for her while she wanders off to fetch a forgotten item. He’s not impressed and tells the other customers, ‘We’re not going to wait for her.’ His basket is full of reduced items. One item refuses to scan and the barcode misbehaves when I type it in. I suggest getting a supervisor. ‘If they can’t mark it up properly then leave it for someone else to buy.’ He’s ready to detonate by the time we’re done, so when I give him his change back he’s looking for a scrap.

  ‘You’ve only given me £3.53.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right.’

  ‘Well, how much is it?’ I show him his receipt—his shopping came to £6.47.

  ‘So the right change from £10 would be £3.53,’ I tell him. He stares at his change for a bit longer and then stands to the side (to unnerve me more than anything else). He double-checks the receipt and counts the change slowly. Twice. He wants trouble but he won’t find it on my shift.

  One bloke is buying three packets of barbecue crisps for his lunch. ‘Come on, you can do better than that,’ I joke.

  ‘It’ll fill me up and it only costs a couple of quid.’

  ‘But keep that up and you’ll pay a higher price with your health,’ I tell him.

  Foreigners frequent the tills doing their getting-by-without-speaking-the-language thing. By my estimation, one in five customers at the basket tills doesn’t speak English. My questions about bags, Nectar cards and school vouchers are met with baffled expressions. A man with two white bloomer loaves responds with the same ambiguous grunt to every single question I ask him.

  My collection of customer recipes is rapidly growing. A Jamaican woman gives me her favourite beans-and-rice combo:

  Boil a tin of kidney beans and rice. Add salt, pepper and Thai spice. Leave until cooked. ‘You’ll never look back.’

  A cordon-bleu chef recommends Jane Asher’s chocolate fudge cake mix as the best chocolate cake on the market. ‘Even better than what I could put together myself.’

  As the afternoon passes, dads start piling in with their Indian meals for one, which can only mean that lots of the mums in this part of London are on a girls’ night out. And for the ladies staying in, their menfolk have Friday-night romance in mind. I scan many bunches of flowers, chocolate trays, easy-listening CD sets and, of course, condoms. The girls, though, are obsessing over domestic matters. ‘I only came in for some kitchen scales/pasta sauce/rice/loaf of bread. How did I end up with this lot?’ asks one female customer after another. This is what the shopping list of a woman who came in to buy cleaning cloths that would have cost her 34p looks like:

  Linguine x 2

  Tagliatelle

  Lurpak spread

  Napoleta
na sauce x 2

  Yoplait Frubes

  Tropical juice

  Green dessert pears

  Fruitella

  It costs her £9.83. Her expression tells me everything I need to know about how appalled she is with herself.

  Another customer who came in to exchange a toy got distracted by the clothes. She spends £40 on deodorant and clothes. Her six-year-old is out of his mind with boredom and she has in twenty minutes flat bought a pair of jeans, two sets of bikinis (despite the rain today), a black top, a jersey cardigan and two toothbrushes. She is also, predictably, standing at the till doing a little emotional self-harm.

  Michaela only has an hour until she leaves, so as Barbara passes she asks, ‘Do I have relief tonight?’ This is the only surefire way of knowing if you will be staying beyond your shift. ‘I don’t know,’ says Barbara in a sing-song voice. ‘You’re just going to have to wait until 5.30 to find out.’ And with that she charges back to her till captain high horse.

  I don’t know if it’s Michaela and her sexual allure, but men are flocking to the baskets in even larger droves than normal. Most of them, due to what I have now concluded is an inherent dysfunctional dexterity, struggle to open the plastic bags. Proof, if we’re to buy into supermarket biological determinism, that blokes are, without doubt, the dumber sex.

  One of my last customers tonight is a pregnant woman with a stomach so large, her tummy arrives first and her face ninety seconds later. With my usual diplomacy and delicacy I blurt out the first thing that comes to mind.

  ‘Oh, my goodness—are you about to give birth now?’

  ‘No,’ she laughs, ‘three more months left. I’ve got twins in there.’

  Like an overexcited seal, I start flapping my hands together. ‘Do you know what you’re having?’

  ‘One of each.’

  I’m so excited I’m ready to go into labour on her behalf. But she just looks exhausted. ‘Can you come back to me again in a few weeks?’ I plead. ‘I really want to see how you’re getting on.’

  ‘Yes, of course. And I’ll bring them in to meet you when they’re born too,’ she says kindly. I nod fervently. But I know that I’ll be long gone before they arrive.

  Rebecca is doing some overtime and ends up sitting on baskets with me for the last two hours of my shift and insists on telling our customers that they should be served by me rather than her ‘due to the excellent customer service that she provides’. And so they come to me, while she kicks back and relaxes.

  When I finish my shift I head to Grace’s till. She finishes at 7 p.m. I look at my watch and it is 7 p.m. She has three other customers behind me and there is no closed sign on her checkout. ‘You are a lunatic, Grace. Do you WANT to be here till 10 p.m.?’ I whisper to her.

  ‘I know, I know, you’re right.’

  ‘Look, Betty is over there—tell her you’ve finished.’ Betty sends someone to get a sign for the till. A customer joins the queue anyway—and Grace says nothing. I know she’ll be here until 7.30 p.m.

  ‘You’re too polite, Grace.’ She gives me a feeble smile. As I grab my bags I notice the man behind me has two packets of condoms, two bottles of white wine, strawberries and some melting chocolate. Grace scans his things with the discretion of a secret service agent. As I walk out of the store I promise to muster up the courage to walk into a store (that I have no intention of returning to) and strut to the checkout with a fullon X-rated shop—condoms, pregnancy tests, sexy knickers. Just to prove to myself what I’ve long known: it takes a lot to shock a Cog.

  Friday, 24 April 2009

  The sun is shining and it is without a doubt the most exquisite day we’ve had all year. As a misguided press officer once said—a good day for bad news. This recession is worse than predicted and more severe than anyone expected. The Chancellor, Alistair Darling, has now said this is the deepest recession since the Second World War and the number of people out of work has risen to 2.1 million.

  There seems to be a determined gear change amongst those who are intent on making cuts. One customer buys only the Basics range and it costs him £40.77. His basket includes chopped tomatoes, tins of sweetcorn, corned beef, vodka and eggs. Others are buying honey, carrots, herbs, peppers, mushrooms and mozzarella—all from the cheaper range—and vouchers and points are being used more frequently than ever before. A Polish couple seem to have emptied the shelves of the entire range. Everything in their basket is in the tell-tale white packaging with orange writing: cola, tomato ketchup, Swiss roll, chicken noodles, carrots, beans, apples, pasta, chicken kiev, pizza, sausage rolls, salmon trimmings, coleslaw, pork luncheon meat and yogurt. The grand total is £24.35, probably half of what the more expensive ranges would have cost them.

  One woman tells me, ‘I’m an impulse buyer and a place like this is quite dangerous for me, especially since you now do all these clothes, DVDs, books and videos—I’m going to end up broke coming in here.’ She’d save a fortune if she shopped online like one of my regular customers, a mum to three boys:

  ‘It only cost me £100, but it was a complete disaster—I couldn’t remember everything we have and the boys just whinged because of what I had missed.’

  So today her shopping costs £154. ‘I don’t mind. It’s a small price to pay for not having them all moan at me.’

  A customer arrives at the till and does what many customers do. ‘Can you tell me how many points I’ve got on my card?’

  ‘Yes, if you give me your card, I can tell you at the end.’

  ‘Can’t you tell me now?’

  ‘Um, no, because I haven’t swiped your card yet, for one. And two, I need to put something on your bill to be able to take something off your card.’ She looks totally confused and affronted. I don’t expect her to understand the entire transaction process, but this is not complex physics. ‘It’s the same logic as at the bank: give me your card and I’ll tell you what you’ve got. Until you give it to me to scan, how can I tell you?’ It takes another minute before it clicks.

  Heat does a funny thing to our heads. We experience it so infrequently that, when it arrives, we rip our clothes off, throw back more drinks and go on shopping binges. The Barbecue Bunch are buying meat, BBQ utensils, coal, salad, strawberries and wine by the gallon. One couple who haven’t done their weekly food shop yet spend £121.26 on this stuff. They contemplate for a few moments putting back the extra £12 they’ve spent on DVDs for their eighteen-month-old before deciding, ‘At least it’ll keep him busy while we do the barbecue.’

  After my break I serve an old lady with severely twisted fingers and chronic arthritis. It’s so bad she can’t pack, can’t take her cash out and can’t put her change back. I help her pack, take the money out and put the change back in her purse for her. I wonder how she will get her shopping into her house—and how she copes generally. ‘I know what you’re thinking, love,’ she suddenly says. ‘Don’t worry about me, I get by, I rely on the kindness of strangers.’

  I’ve lost count of the number of times a Mr or Mrs Elderly has been ‘holding up’ the queue while packing their shopping slowly with arthritic hands. Meanwhile customers sigh deeply and loudly behind them. Shopping is a tense affair—this much I’ve learnt in my time here. And the dumping ground for all the tension acquired while traipsing around the store is the till. Sometimes I’m the garbage can and sometimes, sadly, it’s the customer causing the delay. I feel another letter coming on.

  Dear Supermarket Giant,

  Far be it from me to tell you how to do your job, but are you aware that one of your key customer groups are the goldenagers?

  I know you probably do a lot to make lives easier for them—I’ve seen the trolley boys who help them with their shopping to the car and we Cogs are always ready to pack for them when they want it. But these OAPs come in during the week to avoid the weekend scrum. Their jowls wobble, they are almost deaf, but somehow they still hear the crowd of unsympathetic customers exhaling noisily behind them. They punch their pin numbers in over
and over again and it brings them to their rheumatism-ridden knees every time. Often it’s not because they can’t remember their numbers but because the pin-pads are not as responsive to their hands. It’s painful to watch and crushing to tell them it’s still not registered. Those wretched pin-pads are not made for eyes that have to squint hard to read instructions.

  Don’t mistake me for a Help the Aged campaigner; truth be told, I find many of them ill-tempered and cantankerous, but my mum is seventy-plus and I can’t bear the thought of her going through this kind of ritual humiliation once a week. So here’s what I suggest.

  Give your staff some training so they know how to handle and help them, and more importantly, how to deal with the insensitive customers queuing up behind. And make an exception on the receipt-signing issue—if they can’t remember their pin or get it right and they look old enough, just let them sign, will you? I’ve had to turn away an elderly lady who couldn’t get her pin right and didn’t have another card with her. She had spent a good hour in your store and almost two hours of her day on the shopping trip. She was happy to give you a good £40 from her pension, so why turn away her business?

  Yours,

  A. Cog

  A woman stops off post-gym session. I can smell her from five yards away. The sixty-four-year-old man in front of her doesn’t need his school vouchers.

  ‘Why don’t you give my school vouchers to this…er…man…’ He turns to look at her properly. ‘Um…sorry…er…lady…um…man…’ He trails off, grabs his bags and races out of the store.

  A customer arrives with a full trolley. She throws her bag down, doesn’t look at me and doesn’t respond to my hello.

  ‘I’ve got six bags.’ She’s still loading and I can see she’s in a hurry.

  ‘Should I pack for you?’ I ask. She nods. I put two sets of toilet roll packs, a bar of soap, a hand cream and cotton pads in one bag. When she has finished loading she comes back to my end of the till. She takes the bag I’ve just packed, looks at it and tuts loudly. She then empties it and starts again.