The Poet on Register

I like to write poetry, though I’m not very good at it. The rhymes get all jumbled in my head and I can rarely make it flow the way I want it to. Despite this, I often enter poetry contests on a website called verbal.media, where my efforts go largely unnoticed. It is my belief that poetry is meant to inspire, to wake up some part of the soul with a gentle alarm of reconsideration, and to make people remember things they never knew. This is more easily said than done for clumsy wielders of verbiage such as myself, yet I persevere in my attempts to touch this particular sort of magic.

When I’m at work these efforts can seem futile, which, I guess, is why I stole the eggs. People in this country think that “winning at life” means some opus of success that can be identified. They like a reference point so they can say “oh look at that juncture of talent and timing,” or “what foresight,” but that’s easy to do when you’re zoomed all the way out. Most people don’t even get the chance. If I were a better poet I’d write about that, but I’m not so I stick to the small stuff.

The price of eggs has recently increased to the point that the situation has required several White House press conferences. It has become an issue of grave concern to many shoppers at the store, and while not every conflict is egg-related, tensions are higher than normal. Just yesterday there was a face-off with a shopper in the frozen section. Corporate policy requires that employees never attempt to correct a customer, which can result in some truly confounding experiences. For example, the woman yesterday insisted that we help her find frozen “shrimp and papaya.” As we carry no such product, it required a top-to-bottom search of the freezers to locate the “shrimp paella” she was actually looking for. She walked away, paella in hand, still believing we were wrong and had wasted her time for no reason.

I feel like I’m extra susceptible to the linguistic sorcery of poetry. When the verses hit the language center of my brain, it’s like a drug. I can get lost in the rushing swoon of it all, and that staticky ASMR tingling can take over my whole body. If I were a better poet, I’d write poems about the customers. I’d convey how hard it is to reconcile the knowledge I have that these are intelligent people with rich inner lives and loved ones and hobbies who are merely presenting as mindless, illiterate, agitated robots due to the circumstances of our encounters. I’d say that I understand how, to them, I am merely an interface to their user experience, but I’d also say how dehumanizing that is.

On a good day, about half of the shoppers I interact with say “please” and “thank you.” During the holidays it’s less than a quarter. Even the fact that employees are contractually obligated to be polite often doesn’t serve as enough of a reminder that such pleasantries exist to warrant reciprocation. It makes me feel like I’m surrounded by zombies, but I know part of that is just the store itself. The same sort of psycho-social design that they used to just use for casinos is everywhere now. The idea is that if you can discombobulate people enough, they’ll spend more money. I don’t know how effective it is, but it certainly makes working in modern corporate retail environments a nightmare. I wish someone would design a store that makes people nice, I’d apply right away.

If I were a better poet, I’d write about the spectrum of human behaviors I get to witness. When I’m working on register, I might get a cash customer who keeps each bill in a separate ziploc bag, expecting me to retrieve each in turn and return their change in the same way, no matter how long the line is behind them. I can put this sort of thing down to some mental affliction, though part of me wonders if they’re onto something. Maybe they’re just trying to protect their spirit.

It’s harder to understand the people who withdraw wet wads of bills from their bras and underwear. At no point during the extensive training sessions I attended as a new hire was it suggested that contact with strangers’ bodily fluids was going to be part of the job, but here we are. This sort of casual disregard for others permeates many of my daily interactions with customers, but sweaty cash isn’t even my main reason for hating being on register.

The company has gone to great lengths to differentiate itself from the competition by providing what it thinks is a friendlier shopping experience. As a result, corporate policy insists that we attempt to engage the customer in conversation at checkout. I wish this had the intended effect of lubricating the interaction, but it has mostly led to the store being clowned on by comedians and subjected to countless online memes. Posts comparing buying food at our store to police interrogations garner thousands of likes and HAHA reactions. Yet, those moments at the register represent one last opportunity to appeal to the purchasing impulse, and so we get graded on how many of the people we checkout reach for a bag of beef jerky or some gum, an exit interview completing their hypnotic journey through the store.

In many ways, I prefer rudeness at this juncture. How twisted is that? A “let’s just get this over with” attitude is far preferable to me than the ones that are too happy to engage. The sympathetic, empathetic, human part of me understands that these are often lonely people for whom this will be their sole in-person interaction of the day. This sentiment does not extend to those customers who use the opportunity to express attraction or undue affection upon the cashier, which happens more often, and to a greater degree, than corporate is willing to acknowledge, but I digress.

If I were a better poet, I’d write about how the part of me that is a merely cog in a machine just needs this, and everything during my shift, to go as smoothly as possible. This requires somewhat strict adherence to some social contracts, and it can be a problem when a customer, for whatever reason, chooses to abuse this mutual understanding. I hate that this makes me feel like I’m in an Us vs. Them scenario, causing me to align against this person, whom I know is a victim of the loneliness epidemic. In my heart I understand that I have more in common with them, than I do with the million dollar salary supermarket executives that foisted this on both of us. I can also see the complex chain linking my discomfort to the best interests of the hand that feeds me.

The worst are the people who come in to perform. I don’t mean the protestors with their “Meat is Murder” signs and pro-vegan chants that we mock after they politely shuffle out like they always do. Nor do I mean the proud parents and grandparents who corral anyone within earshot to hear of their offsprings’ accomplishments. These people are capitalizing on the presence of a captive audience, and while it may be annoying or disrespectful, I can understand the origins of the motivations. I cannot, for the life of me, understand the man we call The Red Baron, who comes at least once a month.

The Red Baron drives an imported luxury car, which he parks in a handicapped space. From the trunk he withdraws the red wheelchair in which he will sit as he propels himself backwards through the store, pushing himself along with one foot. He pretends to be visually impaired, monopolizing an unlucky employee’s time for the entirety of his hours-long visits. He moans and points at various items, insisting they be presented to him, inches from his eyeballs, for inspection, before sniffing each selection, in turn.

We thought he was a secret-shopper sent from corporate until someone looked him up. Evidently he’s an executive at a semiconductor company an hour away. Multiple complaints have been made, but just like when certain customers get in the habit of buying roses for their favorite employee, determinations are made at the bottom line. Roses are expensive, as are the imported cheeses The Red Baron prefers. He is also one of the very few customers who frequents the tiny cabinet we have on the deli counter stocked with a small amount of saffron, truffles, and vanilla beans. See how it works?

If the general public knew how much perfectly good food we throw away, they’d not be pleased. Ugly produce that would certainly be appreciated at one of the tent cities in the state goes directly into the dumpster to join the bent or broken boxes full of perfectly good food. Certain products that sit on the loading dock too long, rising past some critical temperature, also go directly into the dumpster. We are told it’s a matter of liability so serious that the dumpsters have locks on them. Not getting sued is a major priority for the company.

Despite the ongoing egg crisis, if one shell out of a dozen is found to be cracked, the entire package must be thrown away. No one is happy with this, but there are penalties for disregarding corporate policy. Last week I stole a dozen eggs. More accurately, I stole eleven usable eggs, as one of them was cracked. It was nearing the end of my shift and I’d been assisting in a situation where a longtime customer had just discovered that the extremely cheap cans of tuna fish she’d been buying for years was actually a product intended for cats. I was struck with how, for this woman, nothing in her life had effectively changed other than a germination of new knowledge. There was nothing stopping her from proceeding just as she had up until now, making tuna salad from cat food and always coming back for more.

If I were a better poet I’d write about how this made me feel like a witness in the Garden of Eden. I was thinking about just that when another employee walked up and handed me a dozen eggs. He didn’t have to say anything, as I could see the yellow yolk oozing through the clear, plastic packaging. I thought about how often recently I’d been made to feel like the cost of eggs was somehow my fault. The news and politicians can talk about bird flu and supply chain issues every single day, but those talking heads don’t live where the rubber meets the road in late-stage capitalism. Just then, I saw The Red Baron scoot through the main entrance, so I stole the eggs.

Instead of walking them out the loading dock to unlock the dumpster with its numeric code, I took them to my employee locker and put them in my bag. I knew this was a fireable offense, but in that moment I just couldn’t be complicit in the awfulness of it all, if you know what I mean.

When I was little, sometimes my grandmother would babysit me on weekends. We’d sleep in on Sunday after staying up to watch the late shows on Saturday night. Around eleven AM Grandma would whip up Eggs Benedict, calling it “brunch.” She’d drink mimosas and we’d reenact our favorite scenes from the night before, ending with the ritual consumption of cantaloupe slices. I’d sneak sips from her fluted glass when she wasn’t looking, though the crisp champagne bubbles made me sneeze every time.

I recreated the meal at home that night, purchasing oranges and a melon before leaving the store. I put too much cayenne pepper in the hollandaise sauce, but there were memories unlocked during the whisking and poaching. Unable to afford champagne, I mixed cheap Prosecco with the fresh squeezed juice, but it didn’t matter, I still sneezed. At the end I cried, and my salty tears mingled with the cantaloupe juice on my lips. I wrote a poem about it and today it won $5 as a runner up in a contest on verbal.media. That’s not even enough to pay for the eggs, but then I got a congratulatory message on the site.

A British man living in Johannesburg contacted me, saying that my poem had reminded him of his mother, and that he’d been moved enough to make his own batch of Eggs Benedict. He thanked me for opening that door for him. It’s a small victory, but I’ll take it.