Notes From The Checkout Lane
by Zayne Reeves

To work in retail is to experience a kind of open season declared on your personal dignity and overall faith in the basic decency of the human race.  The customer service industry is, essentially, proof that both Thomas Hobbes and Belize from Angels In America were right; life is nasty, brutish and short and people are mean, terminal and crazy.  In the two years that I have worked for my current employer, I have, among other highlights, been loudly accused of racism by a customer because I suggested that she owed seven cents for a Xerox copy that she had ripped to shreds for no discernible reason.  This same customer once urinated into a trashcan in our store; and guess who got to clean that up?  Angry soccer moms have lobbed science project boards at me in protest of the board's price and countless teachers have bitterly dressed me down because their school purchasing card was declined again.  Every single day on the job is a reminder that the fabled "old, weird America" is not dead.  It isn't even sick.

It all gets worse during the holidays.  Not so much because people are doing anything more extreme than usual, but because the overall hostility factor is ratcheted up a few extra notches.  When the register fails to give a customer the advertised ninety-eight cents off their ream of pastel paper and instead gives them ninety-three cents off, the braying has a special, yuletide flavor of nastiness to it.  I don't blame the customers for this so much as I blame the media and how it saturates our brains with this false notion that shopping during the holiday season is supposed to resemble the cast party for Marat/Sade.  Softball morning talk shows tell consumers to adhere to the "squeaky wheel gets the grease" ethos because if you are willing to make a spectacle of yourself in a public place, you will be accommodated in order to pacify and avoid a negative customer satisfaction comment. 

The problem with this is the absolutely soul-crushing effect these hissy fits have on cashiers and other employees who wait on hundreds of customers each and every day, many of whom choose to act like jerks because they think that is what they are supposed to do.  It's enough to make you believe that a film like Bad Santa is actually a hard-hitting documentary and it has to stop.  I don't mean to be pedestrian in my conclusion here, but I think the world we live in would be an immeasurably better place if we all took a page out of John Prine's book and said "hello in there" once in awhile to the cashiers and sales floor associates who are trying to get through the day without incident just like everybody else.

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