I’m several months pregnant in the middle of the summer. To deal with the heat, I tend to go around with as much exposed skin as I can manage and not get a public indecency charge, which means my pregnant belly is very obvious to passersby.

One day, I’m doing a grocery run with my husband when an unfamiliar man approaches me in the middle of the aisle.

Stranger: “Why the h*** are you pregnant?”

A random stranger accosting me over my unborn child in the middle of the grocery store is by far the most bizarre encounter I’ve ever had, and it leaves me speechless. Fortunately, my husband is swifter to respond.

Husband: “Did no one ever tell you how that works? Because I’m not in the mood to explain the mechanics to you.”

The stranger turned bright red and stormed off, while I spent a few minutes trying to stop laughing so I could walk straight. I still don’t know what that man’s problem was, but I’m glad my husband was able to drive him off so swiftly.

Customer: “Where is your peanut butter?”

Me: “That’s on aisle seven.”

Customer: “Thank you.”

They walk away but come back a moment later.

Customer: “I couldn’t see it!”

Me: “They’re all on aisle seven. It’s the far end, approaching the deli.”

Customer: “There wasn’t a deli!”

Confused, I walk with them over to the aisle and point at the sign.

Me: “Here, aisle seven. The peanut butter is to your left.” 

Customer: “Oh… you meant that aisle seven!”

I work the night shift at a large supermarket. I’ve been working here for five years; a coworker of mine — we’ll call her Claire for the purposes of this story — has been here for four.

One day during a winter sale, Claire happened to be passing by when a cashier (who wears a rainbow-flag lapel pin) got into an altercation with a bigoted customer. And by “altercation”, I mean “the customer tried to lunge over the counter and assault the cashier when she told him not to call her a [homophobic slur].” Claire had to intervene and physically restrain the customer long enough for security to arrive and escort him out of the store. 

The next day was my day off. The day after that, three of my coworkers were gone — coworkers who had been there a couple of years longer than I had — and the manager revealed that they had been fired. After the shift, I asked those who had been working yesterday what had happened.

Some of our coworkers had been pestering Claire about why she had intervened in the abovementioned incident; apparently, “a customer is being violent” is not a good reason to try and help a coworker. After too much probing, Claire eventually told them that she was male-to-female transgender; this had never come up before because it happened a couple of years before she was hired, but seeing someone else LGBTQ+ being mistreated had set her off.

All of a sudden, those coworkers — who had been working alongside Claire with no issue for years — started harassing her with transphobic slurs and deliberately incorrect pronouns, and some even called her i.e. “Clark” under the assumption that it was her deadname.

Thankfully, our manager put a swift stop to that, and the offending coworkers were fired immediately. It’s been a couple of years since then. Claire, the manager, and I all still work here, and anyone who demonstrates such bigotry is met with the same swift justice.

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I worked as a cake decorator during my undergrad. I worked in a grocery store chain, so we were all about efficiency and speed; I had like seven minutes per cake to fully assemble and decorate standard case cakes. (That didn’t happen, but I tried!) We could have fifteen minutes for custom orders. The hours we were allotted for cake decorators for one week depended on how productive we’d been in previous weeks; the system counted automatically every time we printed a label for a cake.

Once, a young guy came in and placed a custom order. I was twenty-two, so he was probably around twenty-five. My brain is telling me he looked slightly like a “chill” type; maybe he had a beard and a beanie.

Customer: “I want a sheet cake for my friend’s birthday. On it, I’d like an artistic interpretation of what each of my friends would look like as a cat based on their physical appearances and personality traits. I want each cat to have an item that reflects a hobby — like, one friend who likes to write would have a notebook… but still as a cat. Oh, and I also need you to write each cat’s name so they’ll know who is who.”

He tried to describe each one of his friends to me in terms of appearance, notable characteristics, and hobbies. He had like eight friends.

I wish I remembered how I got out of the conversation and subsequently got out of that order! I usually worked with my manager or my bakery lead, and I feel like the lead took over. We were allowed to reject orders if they were better suited to a specialty bakery. (Many were; I don’t know why people thought we could do tiered cakes or use fondant.) We could turn down orders like this that were straight-up ridiculous.

It was really funny to me, though. I remember the guy being super earnest about the cat cake.

I loved working in the bakery department of a large, upscale grocery store. My job was the customer side, performing at a fast pace while packaging baked goods to fill the shelves, attending to customers, taking custom orders, answering phones — all the tasks you’d expect.

A pleasant young man was hired, and I trained him. He absolutely loved interacting with customers and was a smiling “people person” who was liked by his coworkers — until he wasn’t. He made it a point to work as much on the customer floor as possible, either restocking or arranging product. He would engage everyone who passed by, whether they were shopping or just passing to the next department.

Many times, he’d ask what they were looking for and walk them to the product — at the other end of the store! This left the rest of us to pick up the slack with packaging of tons of product, phones, orders, etc. He schmoozed the customers and many times spent twenty minutes talking to one. Then, he’d move on to the next one. He was getting the stink-eye from his coworkers, but he really thought that was “his job” — and who gets in trouble for making customers happy?

After we complained to the bakery manager, he also wondered how he could rein someone back who got so many compliments from the customers. He was like a personal shopper for the bakery!

The front crew decided to talk up his “skills” to management to maybe get him transferred to another department. Not surprisingly, it was decided that his great customer skills would be perfect for the front end, with sooooo many great comments about how helpful he was. He became a cashier, and not just that, but he became the assistant manager — jumping over thirty cashiers with more seniority who coveted the job.

Now he had a full plate of tasks that couldn’t wait and that he had no experience with, he had unhappy resentful cashiers who didn’t make his job easier, he had to schedule breaks and lunches according to union laws, and he floundered big time.

After six weeks, he begged to be sent back to the bakery, but he’d jumped unions with the promotion and he’d timed out to be able to go back. So, he became a regular, non-star cashier in the trenches. Now he had close supervision, benchmarks for items rung per minute in place, and no time to schmooze the public. He actually worked out fine — but not as happy. He’s still a smiling face and a pleasant person with great customer service skills… but I regret nothing!