Checking Out, Checking In

I enjoy going to the grocery store, especially a nicer one like the Wegmans in Germantown. I have to drive a bit further to get there but the reward is a beautiful clean store that has almost everything I need and a gazillion things I don’t. I used to not need the ‘almost’ qualifier but about six months ago, stopped selling kosher chicken and now I need to drive to Rockville to get kosher chicken and occasional bit of beef.

Going to the store relaxes me. It’s cool in there. There are interesting products to examine and sometimes buy and there is relaxing music inviting me to sing along much to the amusement of my fellow shoppers.

But the part, I don’t love about going to the grocery store is having to check out. I hate waiting in line and even if there is no line, it feels like a waste of time. I’ve just spent 45 minutes loading up my cart with items. Then I have to take them all out again to be rung up then toss them into bags and reload them into the cart and unloading them again 10 minutes later into my car. Then I haul them home too, you guessed it, unload them again!

Around 2019 when I was living in Rochester, New York, the flagship Wegmans in nearby Pittsford introduced a new system. Using a smart phone, one could scan the items as you took them off the shelves and place them directly into your reusable shopping bags. The produce required the extra step of placing them on a scale and weighing and then scanning the code on the scale, but I got very good at that and found it took just slightly longer than just tossing them in the cart. For non-produce, the scanning was almost frictionless. When finished shopping, you’d just walk up to a self-check out station. Scan a screen code with your phone, tap to pay, and you were on your way. Checkout could be completed in under a minute with no unloading and reloading of items. Everything stayed packed in the bags ready to place in the car. Added benefit was that I could carefully pack the bags in such a way that it made it easier to put away the groceries at home. I started going out of my way to shop in Pittsford.

I returned to Maryland just as covid was pandemicing. Stores were all trying to go ‘contactless’ and our Wegman’s here quickly rolled out the self-scan system and I was as happy as could be. I did sometimes feel pangs of guilt about the employees who could potentially be put out of a job by these types of systems but hey, there is no stopping progress, right?

As it turns out, progress can be stopped. Not by compassion for workers but by shoplifters.

Last year Wegmans announced that due to high rates of ‘shrinkage’ (i.e. theft) they were eliminating the self-scanning system. In addition, they now allow self-checkout only if you have fewer than 20 items, effectively pushing me back into the now woefully understaffed checkout lines. Other grocery chains are moving in similar directions.

I don’t blame the stores. Although, I was meticulous about carefully scanning every item, I am sure that for some the temptation to ‘accidentally’ miss scanning items was just too great. No doubt the stores were being robbed.

I was excited, when Amazon started to prepare to open an Amazon Fresh store in what used to be an Office Depot. Amazon uses a system where you just put items in your car and then you walk out of the store. Somehow the system knows what you have purchased and charges you appropriately. I haven’t used it so I don’t know exactly how it works but I was looking forward to trying it. Sadly, Amazon inexplicably changed their minds about opening the store and abandoned the project. Maybe just as well. I don’t really need Amazon in yet another part of my life.

So it’s back to standing in line at Wegmans and although I still dislike all the loading and unloading, one of the benefits of having a highly flexible (and part-time) work situation is that I can try to hit up the store during the least popular times.

And there is a bright spot: Janice.

Janice is the cashier in aisle 7 who is always nice and always friendly. As a confirmed introvert, I am not particularly chatty, but Janice is so genuinely warm that it is impossible not respond in kind. Just as I used to go out of my way to Pittsford to self-scan, I’ll now go out of my way to see Janice, waiting in her line even if it is not the shortest one.

Technology has made life easier in many ways. We can have nearly everything delivered. We can carry out our tasks and the errands of our lives often without so much as exchanging a word with a stranger and never, ever have to stop to ask directions. As convenient as that is, I think there is a sense of, if not community, then communal enterprise, that is lost. It can feel like we need each other less.

But not scanning my groceries myself means I can move through the store, without looking constantly at my phone. I can notice the people around me more and when I happen to help another shopper by picking up an item that they have dropped or chat with Janice or another rare cashier who is as nice as she, I leave the store feeling just a bit better about humanity and the state of the world.

In her poem Small Kindnesses Danusha Laméris says of these tiny interactions:

We have so little of each other, now. So far

from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.

What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these

fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,

have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

Maybe you can share a kind word or even just a smile with a stranger today. Or look into the eyes of someone who is checking out your items in a shop and check in with him or her by asking, “How is your day going?”

A little small talk can have you both living large.