About ten years ago, I worked at the service counter of a local grocery store. One of the cashiers was a young woman who was a senior at a local Catholic high school, so she would have been about seventeen or eighteen. She was an honors student there, so I figured she was kind of smart, too.

One evening, about a week before Christmas, she came stomping up to the service counter.

Cashier: “You’re old. Explain it to me.”

Okay, not the best way to start a conversation. Maybe she’s not as smart as I thought. For the record, I was forty-five at this time.

Me: “Sorry, explain what?”

She waved her hand around.

Cashier: “All this. The shopping, the cooking, and all the decorating. Why are all these people doing all this?”

Me: “Probably for the same reason your family does. Most people just want their families to have a nice Christmas.”

Cashier: “But they can’t all be Catholic.”

Me: “I’m sure they aren’t. What does that have to do with anything?”

Cashier: “Well, Christmas is a Catholic holiday.”

I was surprised to hear this at my advanced age.

Me: “Uh, Christmas is a Christian holiday, not just a Catholic one. Christians of all stripes celebrate it — not always like you or me, but it’s a holiday for all Christians.”

Cashier: “Are you sure? That doesn’t seem right. I’ll have to ask at school tomorrow.”

She walked away, still mumbling about how that didn’t seem right. Considering that she was an honors student at her school and hadn’t realized Christmas is not just a Catholic holiday, I wasn’t convinced about the answer she would get.

But I’m old, so what do I know?

The state of New Jersey has skipped the “make you pay for single-use bags” at stores and jumped straight to “grocery stores can’t give paper or plastic single-use bags.” Fast food places, restaurants, and other to-go type services can. This was finalized about six months before it went into effect, but some places have tons of signs up and are playing announcements, while others seem to pretend the law isn’t going into effect, and everything in between.

I’ve gone ahead and purchased a pile of reusable bags after stockpiling as many plastic ones as possible. (They’re perfect for the little “food scraps” bin in the kitchen.) The law is now active and bag holders are removed or filled with reusable ones you have to purchase. I make my first purchase with my new bags at one of the stores that DID have signs up everywhere.

Then, I get home and realize I only have the few that had stuff in them. Panicking, I call up the store I went to.

Me: “Hey, um, I’m a bit of an idiot. I think I left a few reusable bags on the self-checkout register? The one all the way on the end by the counter.”

Clerk: “Hold a moment, please.”

The clerk goes off to check, I assume, and comes back with a bit of attitude in her voice.

Clerk: “Can you describe the bags please, sir?”

Me: “Yeah, they’re canvas totes about the size of your old single-use ones, they have obnoxiously long handles and [Brand] stitched on the inside of the rim, and they’re kind of a beige, light tan sort of color?”

Clerk: “…Oh. Yes, we have them. Will you be in to pick them up?”

Me: “Any chance I could grab them on the way in to work tomorrow morning?”

Clerk: “Of course. I’ll be in tomorrow; just ask for [Clerk] at the desk.”

I go in the next morning, and sure enough, she’s there, and after confirming, she hands me the bags.

Clerk: “I’m sorry for giving you the third degree on the phone last night. We’ve had a lot of people trying to scam bags since the law started the other day.”

Me: “Honestly? You asked like two questions, standard check stuff. Let me guess, ‘You never let us know,’ ‘This is illegal,’ ‘I deserve compensation,’ yadda, yadda, yadda?”

Clerk: “Yesss! How did you know?”

Me: “Five-year veteran of the Great Retail Wars at [Other Supermarket] and general hater of average human stupidity.”

She laughed. I thanked her and wished her a good day. I turned to leave… and immediately doubled over laughing when the person behind me tried to say he “deserved free bags” because “nobody told him” about the new law. I don’t think he got them.

I get a job as a grocery store cashier when I am in my late teens. I do my best to perform my job to the best of my ability, but I’m not jumping to do more than I’m paid for. One day, my manager sends me on break without a replacement, so I sign out of my register, turn off my light, and put a chain across the lane. Simple. That’s what every cashier is supposed to do when closing down a lane.

Before I can leave the closed lane, however, I’m stopped by a man at least ten years my senior with a mustache and a baseball cap. There’s no way around it: he looks like a stereotypical kidnapper from a school safety video.

Man: “You’re a cashier, right?”

Me: *Baffled* “Yes, sir, but I’m on my break right now.”

Man: “I can see! Thank you for closing down your lane properly! So many people don’t do that!”

He continues talking about how rare it is to find a cashier who correctly closes down their lane until I make an excuse and scurry away because I don’t want to waste my fifteen-minute break.

When I come back, the man is talking with one of my managers. Then, he spots me and points.

Man: “Right there, that’s her! She turned off her light and put the chain across the lane! She did everything right! It’s so rare to see that!”

Seeing my deer-in-the-headlights look, my manager just nods and lets me get back to my register.

I see the man a third time several hours later when I am grabbing something after my shift. By now, I am starting to get suspicious of having an oddly complimentary stalker. After telling a few family members about the situation, they advise me to give my managers a heads-up if I see him again or if his behavior becomes inappropriate.

Sure enough, he is back the next day, in the same shirt no less, so I bring it up quietly with my manager when she has a spare moment, mentioning that I saw him three times yesterday over the span of my eight-hour shift.

Manager: “Oh, don’t worry about him. He’s with corporate, so he tends to spend a while here.”

Me: “Oh, thank goodness. I thought he was some kind of stalker.”

I even saw him in the break room a couple of times. I still feel a little bad for thinking he was stalking me, but when you’re a small woman working with the public, you tend to be on your guard!

I am seventeen, and when I am a cashier at the grocery store, I have a sign up saying I am underage and cannot legally sell alcohol.

A customer has several bottles of wine lined up in my queue.

Me: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m not old enough to scan your alcohol. Can you move over to the next register? She’ll be able to help you there!”

She looks at me in complete disgust.

Customer: “This is wine, not alcohol. I don’t drink alcohol! You are so rude!“

Thankfully, she still moved over to the next line so I didn’t have to deal with her brand of crazy.

I work at a grocery store during high school. One of my jobs is to bag ice in the back, bring it to the front, and stock it in the ice freezers for sale.

A customer comes up to me as I’m wheeling a big cart full of ice bags.

Customer: “Excuse me. Is this ice cold?”

Me: “I’m not sure I understand the question.”

Customer: “I mean is it fresh? Is this ice fresh?”

Me: “It’s clean and comes straight from our suppliers.”

Customer: “No, not clean! Fresh means cold! Is it fresh?!”

Me: “It’s as cold and fresh as ice can be, sir.”

Customer: “It had better be!”

He grabbed some, squeezed it a little like one would some produce, narrowed his eyes at me a little, and wandered off, leaving me confused.

Related:
Their Demands Cut No Ice, Part 2
Their Demands Cut No Ice