This is my story about groceries. You likely have your own story about groceries; lots of people have worked in grocery stores. My dad was one of them, and I after him. I never thought about groceries much until I got my first job1 scanning groceries. Other than going to the grocery store with my parents, having to unload the bins once a week, maybe getting a cookie when I was little - no, like many kids who lead a comfortable life, I didn’t think about groceries.
And then groceries put me through university. It taught me most of my first employment lessons. I love grocery shopping, even with the current racket of prices and the fact I have some pretty brutal memories of those years at the till. Groceries brought me from being a kid to being an adult. I started working at the grocery store just before I turned sixteen and left just before I turned twenty-one. I had three eye surgeries while I was working at the grocery store. I made friends I never would have otherwise met.
I still have dreams about working at the grocery store.
4011, bananas.
This is the first produce code you will learn. It was the example code on the self-checkout machines when I started working at the grocery store. And it was the part of the first training. Scanning items was easy enough to train. It was produce codes that were harder.
A good cashier stores hundreds of codes in their head. They don’t have to look through the list on the computer (which was terribly slow, though did have a hand picture function for the more uncommon ones) or the piece of paper which was diligently printed every month with all of the possible codes you would need to know. We would handwrite the special ones - seasonal, or the special codes for individual store brand waters, or codes for the giant bags of soil so no one had to run out for them.
The master sheet was at self-scan. I still call it that, you know, though I think we’ve all come to say self-checkout. My term is hyper-specific, marking me as someone who ran one from 2007-2012 at a specific grocery store. While you weren’t scanning much at self-scan, you had to be very, very good.
You had to know the codes off the top of your head. You had to be lightning fast at putting in coupons. You had to have an eagle eye to anticipate trouble before it started, and you had to be okay with people screaming abuse at you regularly, like you personally forced them to use the self-scan.
“You’re taking people’s jobs!” many, many people yelled at me.
We were always hiring.
4070, celery.
I was a good cashier, so I graduated to self-scan pretty quickly. And from there, the customer service desk and being a front end supervisor. I’m smart and a people pleaser, an often deadly combination, but one that was well-suited to customer service. I knew what you wanted before you wanted it. I didn’t get outwardly ruffled easily. I could count cash quickly and accurately, and had pretty decent self-scan fixing skills, because they were always breaking.
They were running on Windows ME for the longest time, so I’m not sure why we acted surprised when they did break. There were also a lot of moving parts: a weighted bagging area, the scanner and touchscreen, the cash dispenser.
I always said that if for some reason I was going to rob a grocery store, I would have gone right for the self-scan machines. They were stuffed with cash just before opening, enough to keep them going for the whole day. We had six and they had thousands of dollars in them. And the coin dispensers! They weighed a ton. You never wanted to be the person who dropped one.
3282, red onions.
We had a counter at self scan, which had a main monitor to watch all of the machines, and a second monitor to use as a cash when something messed up. If you tapped one of the lanes on the main monitor, it would switch to a camera view of the scanner at that lane and you could watch more closely to see what people were doing. We also had a palm pilot, which allowed you to do a lot of the same things that the monitor did, but not as efficiently.
Naturally, because the counter was at the best vantage point to keep an eye on the machines and get to everyone who needed help, the store managers were insistent that you didn’t spend very much time there and instead kept walking around. Of course! Why would I want to be in the spot where my job was easiest? Why wouldn’t it be better for me to wander around, and make it harder for people to spot me? Like most of the staff on the front end, I was a short teenage girl. This didn’t make it easy to find me.
4309, lychee.
We used to get tested on produce codes, at least once a month. The front end manager would round up a bunch of less common produce, plus things that got easily confused (apples could be a challenge). Then everyone would have to say what each item was, at the start of their shift.
I have no idea what happened if you got them wrong. I never did.
I developed a reputation for knowing the oddest codes. On a busy day, those summoned to help us out in the front end would beg to be next to me because they could just hold up produce and I would rattle off the code, not pausing my own scanning.
“Alison! What are these?” My boss said from the register in front of me, holding a bag of lychee. Lychee nuts, as called in the system. I think about the wild naming schemes in the produce system now and feel something akin to rage, but also tenderness for my teenage self, who knew it wasn’t properly organized but wouldn’t have the words for a few years.
“Four three oh nine,” I say, whipping a box of frozen pizza across my scanner.
“Thank you!” She turns back to her customer fully. “I really don’t know how she does it, she knows them all. Her brain!”
3082, broccoli crowns.
“Hey!" one of my coworkers announced. “Where did you see that?”
My boss shrugged, as she slid a reusable bag onto the metal arms of the bag rack at a cash. “I saw it in the same video you did just now.”
Grocery stores are not spending time or money on developing or training staff if they don’t have to. They barely want you to spend time on learning vital things for your job. But one Sunday evening, we were all expected to either stay or come in for a couple of extra hours of pay, because we needed to do a handful of things: we needed to practice a fire drill. It turned out nobody had any idea of what to do, and that was bad. We also had some materials from head office to give us updates on different things.
To get us to come or stay, they had a barbeque and fed us supper. As a regular Sunday worker, a positive fixture at the customer service desk the whole day, I really wanted to go home, but I was also not in a position to decline a free meal. Plus, a bit more money. I ate three hot dogs and had a pile of ice cream.
Consequently, I don’t remember much of what we were supposed to learn, other than how far out in the parking lot we had to go if we had to evacuate the store, and the fact that the reusable bags that we’d been selling for years actually had hidden loops where the handles met the bag, which you could use to slide onto the bag rack, and thus, pack them faster.
This is the only time I remember us having a staff meeting.
360, bulk roll.
The soft power that your part-time grocery store employees exercise over store stock is impressive. Because they work there, and usually get their snacks and lunch from the store on break, it means that sales on their favourite items will go up. For the students, this is even more pronounced, because they work at specific times. Because sales on their favourite items are so strong, more of those will be ordered. And thus, they will always be in stock.
A friend of mine and I fell in love with Snapple Peach Iced Tea. We each drank a bottle a shift, probably more like two bottles each on a nine hour shift (two 4s, with an hour lunch). Between the two of us, we were there every day, and we often worked together. The summer before we both went to university was a jolly one, full of us guzzling Snapple Peach Iced Tea.
We both kept the jobs, to work during breaks and so we had guaranteed jobs when we came home for the summer, even if we wanted to look for something different. You were allowed to do that then, to take a “leave” and come back later - it’s not like we had benefits, so this was a mutually beneficial relationship. They got more staff around the holidays, without having to hire new ones who needed to be trained, and we got some extra money between semesters.
However, the real problem with us leaving was revealed my first shift back, when I took my break, and walked down the juice aisle…and there were no more Snapples. They had stopped ordering them, likely because the people who kept buying them had abruptly stopped. So I stood there for a beat, idling away my precious breaktime, staring at the shelf. Life goes on without you, even the job you hate.
94409, organic bartlett pears.
My parents still shop at the grocery store I worked at. It’s the one closest to their house, which was convenient for me then. Some of the people I knew then still work there. Others have retired or moved on; in a few, upsetting cases, people have died. One woman, a lovely older woman nearing the end of her career, who’d been there forever, died suddenly after a car accident in which she seemed fine, but wasn’t. My parents called me that evening, to make sure I’d heard. The staff were devastated, they told me, and my mom sounded somewhat bewildered too. A staple of her weekly routine was gone.
I think about that sometimes. For five years, I was part of people’s lives, if peripherally. I had regular customers and friends. I had those who specifically sought me out when I was on cash, or would stop to chat at the customer services desk on the way out. And then I left, quietly, almost without fanfare. I got another job, and I didn’t go back. People left all the time, but if you made it more than a year, people would remember you.
For years after I quit, people would tell my parents that they missed having me there.
4053, lemons.
What could I do without these numbers rattling around in my head, more than 10 years after I quit? They finally started to drift away a few years ago, except for the ones for things I do buy. But I know where to look for the numbers, and how they’re supposed work.
Last week, I picked up a can of fancy artisanal iced tea. It was payday, and I thought it would be a nice treat. When I went to scan it, it flashed that it wasn’t in the system and I needed assistance. When the clerk came over, I said, “this one’s not on file.”
Not on file is what the cash registers flash at the cashiers when a UPC isn’t in the system. This is not something that will be flashed at you at self-scan.
I didn’t get the artisanal iced tea. I didn’t want it that badly, and it was busy. But I did leave with the old pattern of grocery store language still on my lips.
It was actually my second job. My first job was tutoring math twice a week for $10 an hour. I got paid in cash. It was great.
alison, a valued employee since 2007
Love the injection of product codes throughout; amazing the detail involved in “easy” jobs. And the memories flooding me right now of retail work (class of Staples Store #96, 1997-2000; I can make a playlist of the damn music on the overhead speaker...)
My grocery store story was working in a drug store, pre UPC scanning days. I don't think I want to inflict that on anyone.