The Metro Life

Recently I became an employee at my local highish-end grocery store, Metropolitan Market. The job is not difficult by any stretch of the imagination. I am a courtesy clerk (read: that guy who asks “paper or plastic?” and then puts the food in whichever bag the customer chooses and then asks if he can carry those bags out to the customer’s car and then, if they say “no, I don’t want help,” insist, insist and beg until they let you take their groceries out, because there is a “100% carry-out policy in effect…) and the pay is not at all terrible considering the ease of the job. The schedule changes from week to week, which is simply a nuisance but it’s fairly flexible and I like most of my fellow co-workers. With four exceptions.

Firstly, there is the jaded, angry courtesy clerk. He’s about sixteen, working at a classy supermarket a handful of days a week: the whole cynical, tired thing doesn’t really cut it in this case. During one of my first days on the job, he was showing me the ropes and I was thrown into the following conversation:
“Gawd, the manager’s such a dick,” he said as soon as we were far enough away for the “dick” not to hear.
“Really,” I asked just to make conversation. I was well aware that the manager was a perfectly nice guy.
“Well, if you get on his bad side. I’m on his bad side.”
“Gotcha,” I replied. I thought, That makes sense.
Then, again completely unprovoked, came: “You smoke? I dunno if you do but if you’re on your break, don’t smoke in the parking lot. I learned that the hard way.” He related this information to me in almost a whisper as we walked down the cat food aisle with a broom and an enormous dustpan. This entire conversation seemed to be engineered by my co-worker to let me know just how badass he was: He smokes, he learns things the hard way and in some unexplained way he is now sitting comfortably on the perfectly personable manager’s bad side. Cool, bro.
People, especially this type of people, seem to think learning things “the hard way” somehow earns them cred. Other people, especially smarter people, know that learning things “the hard way” is exactly what it sounds like––hard. It would be far less trouble to have simply asked someone more knowledgeable if you could smoke in the parking lot. That way you wouldn’t have to learn anything the hard way and, more importantly, people would still know that you smoke cigarettes.

Then there are the customers. These customers somehow seem to think that they run the store, which in a way I suppose they do, but in actuality they don’t know shit.

Some of the best interactions I have had so far:

A woman approaches the check stand. As the checker begins to ring her up and I begin my courtesy clerking duties, the shopper begins to talk to us:
“Can I make a suggestion?” This is not a good start. The checker and I glance at each other. “If you put two things of sanitizer wipes on either side out there I think that would help a lot.” Outside, next to where the carts are kept, there is a small plastic canister full of sanitizer wipes to clean off the carts’ handles. It is completely optional to use them and most people don’t bother. In short, they are not in high demand, at all.
“Yeah,” the checker says. “I think one is enough, but if that one is empty we would be happy to go get more.”
I finish bagging her groceries and hand them to her. “Have a great day,” I say. She walks out of the store.

An elderly woman carrying a container of fresh-made soup and a large box of saltines is in line. Now it’s her turn to pay. Before I even get a chance to ask her bag preference she holds up the box of saltines, which is quite damaged, and asks us if we have any other, less-smashed up boxes of tasteless crackers. The checker calls up the grocery manager, who quickly checks and lets us know that there are no more boxes in the store. The checker tells the woman this.
“Okay, well is it okay if I just open this box and see if they are really broken?” She asks.
“Sure, that’s fine.”
She opens the box and pulls out the tubes of crackers. Each tube is about 20% dust; the crackers are broken up sorta badly.
It occurs to me that the only other item she bought is soup. The crackers are obviously for the soup.
“You know, we have little packets of saltine over by the soup for free,” I say.
“I don’t like that flavor,” she retorts, as if it was the most obvious thing in the entire world and there was nothing unusual about holding up the checkout line to examine a box of crackers. I look closer at the box. She’s right, or more accurately, she’s oh-so-wrong; the saltine crackers she has in her hand are unsalted. What?! In fact, the more I thought about it, as I stood there looking at the line forming behind her, the more flaws I found within her entire issue.
“Could you just, like, give me these two?” The woman says, holding up two of the least-crunched tubes of saltines. The checker and I look at each other again.
“No, I can’t do that,” the checker says, somewhat taken aback.
“Well, I just don’t see why I should have to pay for them.”
I fight the urge to tell her all of the things wrong with this argument: Because you’re buying groceries; The crackers are just going to be broken up into the soup, what does it matter if they’re half-broken all ready?; Who the fuck buys unsalted saltines?; and finally the pièce de résistance that I already told her about: WE HAVE FREE SALTINES NEXT TO THE SOUP.
Of course, I don’t say any of this and instead the woman asks me how long her soup will stay hot for because she wants to go to another store to look for the crackers. The checker and I look at each other once again. “About an hour,” I say.
“I don’t know…” the woman says again, seemingly expecting us to make up her insane mind for her. “I think I’ll go home first. Then go out again,” she tells me as we make our way to her Toyota.
“Sounds like a plan,” I tell her, turning to leave.

There are a few not-crazy customers, too though. One day, for instance, Susan Hutchison of local news “fame” bought me a hamburger. That was awesome.

Basically, it is a pretty fine job. It provides me with laughs, some money and a bunch of cool people to talk to in order to balance out all the really not-cool people I don’t want to talk to.