Thought for Food

As a teenager, and again right after college, I worked in a grocery store. The two stints totaled about six years, and I did just about every job you could imagine, except meat cutter.

(Meat cutting is a skill that has to be developed. Keeping track of all of those different cuts and varieties of meat isn’t something learned quickly. Although I do think it stops well short of making a meat cutter capable of performing surgery on a human body, a claim made by a veteran meat cutter for one of the companies where I worked.)

Working in a grocery store imparts a certain amount of wisdom upon those who pay attention. Since everyone shops at a grocery store—rich, poor, young, old, black, white, brown, yellow, red—we get to know people from a wide swath of the community. And as any grocery worker will tell you, there’s no difference among people when they enter a grocery store. They’re all equal in their moronocity, which is a word I might have just invented. It describes the moronic level of a person.

People of great intellect outside of grocery stores are reduced to bumbling primates. Normally courteous people leave a trail of germs for other customers. Mathematicians forget how to count.

I’m not saying these things to be mean. I’m saying them so we can recognize there are problems. If you haven’t worked in a grocery store, you might not even know the problems exist. Perhaps you’re familiar with other manifestations of these problems if you work with the public in other fields, but some of them are distinctly grocery in nature.

So, as a public service to you, I have a few tips to keep in mind the next time you’re in a grocery store. The grocery employees will appreciate your new wisdom, as will your fellow shopper, although they might not even realize they’re benefitting from it.

Without further ado…

--Unless you have difficulty walking, you’re going to get into the store much quicker if you take that empty fifteenth space in the row than if you wait for the woman backing out of the second space in the row.

--The display of grapes in the produce department is not a free buffet. You know what grapes taste like. True, there is some variance in taste and firmness, so if you must try one grape, go ahead. Better still to squeeze a lone grape through the bag. Whatever you do, there’s no need to take an entire handful of grapes to chomp on as you walk through the store.

--There are other people in the store besides you, so try not to park your cart in the middle of the aisle.

--If something is empty on the shelf, then in all likelihood there is none “in the back.” And if you find someone to go check “in the back,” there’s a high likelihood that that person is going “in the back,” sitting on a stack of boxes for a minute, and then coming out and telling you there is no more.

--If you drop something and it breaks, please tell us so we can clean it up before every other customer drives their cart through it and drags it around the store. We won’t yell at you or even charge you for whatever your broke. Probably.

--If you can’t operate the self-check lanes, don’t use the self-check lanes.

--Express lanes. You see the sign. You know how to count. Don’t be a jerk.

--If an item doesn’t scan the first time, it’s not free. And believe it or not, you’re not the first person to come up with that idea.

--If an item doesn’t ring up with the right price, it’s more likely than not that you looked at the wrong tag.

--Most places will adjust the price of something that is “ringing up wrong.” They do this not because they know they made a mistake, but because it’s just easier than proving to you that the customer is not always right.

--At the end of your visit you’re going to have to pay for the things you buy. Best if you have your payment method ready. If you wait to dig into your wallet until the cashier tells you your total you’ve waited too long and you’re making things slower for everyone.

There you have it. My tips to you. There are plenty more where these came from. And if you think they don’t apply to you, please re-read them, because they do. The only way to make sure they never apply to you is to go work in a grocery store for a number of years.

I dare you.