The Checkout Staff are not Humans

I recently read that attacks on shop workers, both physical and verbal, have risen by 50% this year. It got me thinking back to when I worked at a shop.

I first got the job in 2007 and things were sort of okay at first. I was just getting used being sat on a checkout for hours at a time, given the occasional 15 minute break at intervals of 2–3 hours. It wore me down by about 6 months in.

It depends on the type of person you are that dictates if you’re really suited to the type of frontline shop work I was given. To this day, I have no idea why I was made to be a checkout worker instead of being stuck in the warehouse lifting boxes. Some people are sociable and friendly, I’m an introvert and get easily tired by having to put up a pleasant front at all times, and that basically comes with the territory of checkout work. You’re supposed to smile and be friendly for hours at a time to hundreds of complete strangers. Its exhausting, and actually one of the most demoralising working environments I can think of.

People look at me with confusion when I tell them what it was like working on a checkout, and I agree my stories of it are strange and surreal. Some of us (I’d call normal people) don’t realise that to others, shopping, even if its just for food, isn’t ‘a chore I have to do’, its a social engagement. Whenever I go to a shop these days, I’m there to buy food. Its not an ‘experience’, its a utilitarian activity that means I get to have a fridge full of food for the week. I can either operate a checkout myself at a self-service checkout, or I can go to one operated by a person, which is quicker and requires less effort on my part. I say “thank you” to the person who served me at the end, they say “thank you” in response, and if the person did what I wanted (i.e. scanned my items and pressed some buttons) then job well done as far as I’m concerned. I don’t need the checkout person to be particularly joyful and start a conversation with me, I just want my food, but apparently us normal people are in the minority. What lots of people expect when they do their shopping is for the entire environment to be curated around trying to hide the fact the shop workers are human.

We had regular appraisals where there was a form where your supervisor would watch you serve customers for half an hour and rate your smile. This sounds strange and Orwellian when I tell people about it, but this is genuinely what happened. My smile was always rated low. I have a strange immovable face where when I try to smile, I think I’m smiling, but then someone tells me I look sad and I realise I’ve fucked it up. I was trying my hardest, but every time a customer would tell me I looked sad (because I was) it would set me back and make me even sadder, because they were essentially saying I wasn’t trying hard enough. It ended up in a vicious cycle where comment by comment, things would get worse. I’d hear this hundreds of times over the course of a shift. Customers will assess your face and make an unfiltered comment.

“You look miserable.”

“You look like its the worst day of your life.”

“Why aren’t you smiling?”

One or two of these would be fine, but I heard this HUNDREDS of times a day. One woman I remember who seemed to mean well phrased her comment on my smile as this:

“Y’know, you can smile if you want!”

She couldn’t read my mind obviously. She didn’t know that I spent every second behind that checkout thinking about killing myself because typically when people interact with checkout staff, they think of them only in the context of the checkout. Their home lives, hopes and dreams and emotional turmoil are invisible. They exist to scan items for me. That is this human’s function.

Its just incredibly hard to hear this all day, every day, “why aren’t you smiling?”, “why aren’t you smiling?”, “why aren’t you smiling?”, translated in my head to the words, “you’re not good enough”, “you’re not good enough”, “you’re not good enough”, heard all day, every day, round the clock.

Of course the response would be “well why are you working in a shop then?” To which the obvious answer is because money doesn’t grow on trees, I was in my late teens, early 20s, any other job wants specific qualifications and experience and this job was easier to get. I still don’t understand how anyone can have an opinion rooted in the fairy-tale notion that all jobs are done by people who are in their ideal job. We HAVE to work, that’s capitalism.

My solution to my ever-spiralling mental health was to give myself something to do that might cheer me up a bit while I had a spare few seconds when the queue was quiet or I was waiting for a customer to find their card. I brought in a little pad of post-it-notes with me and started drawing things between customers. Just silly mindless doodles. Dinosaurs, rabbits, houses, nothing too complicated. I like drawing. I found it soothed me. It helped me be a bit more personable.

Then, a customer came back to me about two hours after I’d served him. I’d been doodling on my post-it-notes while I’d been waiting for him to get out his card, put it in the machine and tap in his pin number. He actively came back to my checkout two hours later and started accusing me of writing down his pin number. Apparently my doodling while he’d been using the card reader had been bugging him when he got home and he felt he HAD to come back and confront me about it.

Obviously I said “I don’t have your card. What use would your pin number be without your card? I was just doodling. Look.”

I showed him the post-it-notes and his face fell as he realised that I was right and there was no way this was an attempt to steal his details. His paranoid conspiracy over my doodles made no sense.

“But-but you can see where I’m coming from, can’t you?” he asked.

“…no.”

There was an awkward silence and he left.

My supervisor then came over and told me I wasn’t allowed to doodle anymore.

Nothing I did worked. Trying to be happy in a job designed to wear you down just doesn’t cut it.

Most shifts ended with me going to the chocolate aisle and buying massive share bags of Maltesers, M&Ms and other junk food. I’d then go home and just curl up under my duvet and eat until I felt sick.

I’ve always hated the slogan ‘the customer is always right’ purely because of my experiences in retail. Mostly its because I ran into instances where its blatantly untrue quite a lot. A fair few times customers tried to pay for their shopping with expired vouchers, how is that ‘right’? One guy yelled at me for rejecting them screaming at me “ITS A BLEEDING CON! YOU’RE A BLEEDING CON!” I don’t know why he yelled. I don’t know what he expected me to do about it. I’m on minimum wage, my job is to move objects through a machine. Am I supposed have a time machine and go back to two months ago and remind you to use a voucher for soft drinks that’s about to expire? We can’t let people pay with expired vouchers — how was that customer ‘always right’?

I kept being told by supervisors and managers that I was supposed to be a representative of the supermarket. I was the face of it. I was on checkouts. I was supposed to represent the brand, so its only right for me to bear the brunt of any issues customers had. That’s the job. That guy wasn’t screaming at ME as such, he was screaming at the SHOP. The system.

The only problem with this conceptual idea of “the checkout worker” is that most people in these roles are kids with no experience or understanding of marketing or branding and legitimately are just people hired to move produce through machines. Checkout work has nothing to do with marketing and branding and if it does, then these people probably should be paid more if the job requires putting up with being verbally abused, right?

The ideal customer just buys food, no questions asked. The ones that want and demand an ‘experience’ are the worst and its rooted in ‘the customer is always right’. This phrase creates entitlement. It creates an expectation that because you’re paying a shop, that means you get to treat someone being paid a tiny fraction of a percentage of that shop’s profits like a piece of dirt under your shoe.

The next story is second-hand. I heard it several years after I left the supermarket while talking about shop work with a colleague. He told me he’d watched an incident in a supermarket at the weekend where the shop was busy and there were a few checkouts that weren’t open. A customer had put his shopping on one of the empty belts and gone over to a shop worker who was stacking the shelves and told him to open the checkout for him. The shop worker obviously said sorry but he wouldn’t do that because he’d been told to stack the shelves by his supervisor. That was his job. To do what the supervisor told him. The customer then started screaming at him.

“I’M THE CUSTOMER. WHEN I SAY JUMP, YOU SAY, HOW HIGH!?!?”

The most disturbing thing about this story to me was my colleague didn’t tell me this story with any sense of shock. To me it sounded unhinged, to him, the customer had a point. You’re in a shop, paying that shop money, its the shop’s duty to see to your every need. When you say jump, the shop worker is supposed to say “how high?”

I never saw any physical abuse while I worked on checkouts, but the idea its become widespread really doesn’t surprise me. If the shop worker is expected to be completely deferential to your will on every front, if they have to hide the fact they’re a human being with feelings that can be hurt by people screaming at them over an expired voucher for soft drinks, then the next logical step for a customer if the shop worker doesn’t see to your needs or contradicts you can easily go from verbal abuse, to physical. The customer is ALWAYS right.

It doesn’t matter if you find shopping a stressful experience. The shop workers just want to come in and do their jobs and go home, just like you.