Special: Soul for sale

One of my favorite things to do while travelling is to go grocery shopping. I love seeing how the stores look, all the cool and different things there are to eat, things I’ve never seen before, or variations I’d never dreamed of, vegetables whose taste and preparation requires research, mysterious containers with unknown contents. I enjoy watching people shopping, seeing how their little routines differ from mine—people tend to buy the same things every time they go to the store. I watch the French bite into their bread after leaving the bakery; I marvel at the range of sweets on display or how many sauces or olives are on offer; I wonder just how that little cheese or that funny looking drink would taste.

Checking out is also a different experience; in the US, you place your food on the conveyor belt, it is scanned and bagged and replaced in your cart. In France and in Spain, your food is scanned, and the checker may bag your purchases or at least give you plastic bags for you to do it yourself, and you have time to read the magazines a bit before it’s your turn.

In Germany, it’s different: At Aldi, where the rumor is that employee wages are dependant on their ability to scan a certain number of items per minute, there is no time lost—your purchases are scanned quickly, and before you can barely toss them, completely unpacked and with no system or order whatsoever, into your cart, the cashier is already impatiently awaiting your payment or card, repeating a mechanical litany of instructions (will you be paying with bar or card? Please insert card, stripe lower right, enter your PIN and confirm twice). Before you can finish tossing the rest of your stuff into your cart the next customer is glaring impatiently and the checker has started on his or her purchases, such that there is real danger of your items falling on the floor before you can grab them. It can be harrowing for the uninitiated.

But you get used to it. You get used to the fact that people don’t screw around in the checkout line, there are no magazines to read and no time to read them, and it’s really not that big a deal to bag your own groceries at the special counter in the back with the bags you brought or bought yourself. When you travel, you become exasperated at the glacial pace with which the cashiers in other countries scan the items. In Spain, I waited in line with a baguette, a package of olives and one of yoghurt, behind a woman with a huge cartful of groceries which were, thankfully, about 90% scanned, bagged, and in the cart by the time I arrived. The cashier, for reasons known only to her and certainly not to me, began to print off three-foot receipts, fill each of them (three times!) out with the patron’s name, address, ID info, complete medical history and several other things. I, meanwhile, wait (relatively) patiently, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to devour my meagre lunch before returning to work. I think I must have sprouted several grey hairs during my wait. Even in France, faster than Spain and slower than Germany, the wait began to get to me and I tried not to look impatient as the grandmother in line before me counted out twenty five coins to pay for her purchase.

So I was missing my beloved unfriendly German checkers. I returned to Germany, and returned to Aldi, where the comforting repetitiousness of their monologue (will you be paying with bar or card? Please insert card, stripe lower right, enter your PIN and confirm twice) provided a balm to my impatience, until the following occurrence made me wonder if working as a checker, by virtue of the monotony of the job, turns you into a machine, removing all trace of humanity or common sense:

The checker was checking with all her might (will you be paying with bar or card? Please insert card, stripe lower right, enter your PIN and confirm twice). The person in front of me had maybe eight items; the checker checked the first five or so (will you be paying with bar or card? Please insert card, stripe lower right, enter your PIN and confirm twice) and forgot the last three; only the initial purchases were part of the transaction. “I’m sorry,” she says, “I didn’t see them. I’ll have to do another transaction.” The customer didn’t mind, so the checker scans the items and repeats again, as if the customer could not possibly remember what she had just been told thirty seconds before: “Will you be paying with bar or card? Please insert card, stripe lower right, enter your PIN and confirm twice.”