Foodland

Land of food and the food of the land.

I grew up in an old steel town outside of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, called Ambridge. When I moved to England, I learned that this is the name of the fictitious home of The infamous Archers, the longest-running radio soap opera in Britain, and it became my slightly confused claim to fame when introducing myself in the UK.

When I lived there it had a population of 8,000 and its actual claims to fame were the 300+ strong high school marching band (Yes, I went to band camp), a founding society that was so religious they became celibate and eventually extinct, and a record in the Guinness World Book for having the most bars, churches and funeral homes per capita in America.

The best way to describe my neighborhood is to describe Foodland, the local grocery store and a rite of passage for many teenagers’ first steps into employment. I was hired as a cashier when I was 15 and had to get a work permit for the $5.12 an hour job. The roles were gender-stereotyped, boys in the back in the stockroom and girls in the front on the tills.

Half the girls were other students from my high school. Most would only last a month or so. But the ones who both preceded me and continued on would either leave school after getting pregnant, drop out of school and then get pregnant or overdose on heroin just after graduation.

The other half, were middle-aged women with cigarette-smoked skin who’d started working there when they were in high school and paid for their shift meals with food stamps. It was always a celebrated occasion when one of them had earned enough paid vacation to take a week off to sit at home.

Foodland’s clientele were as eclectic, if not eccentric, as its employees.

There was Smokey Artificial-Larynxton who, with the help of her electronic voicebox, would request two cartons of cigarettes (120's), which I would repeatedly ask my manager if I was legally obligated to provide.

Mousey O’Repacker would observe while I’d spend ten minutes packing her groceries into plastic bags under her meticulous instruction only for her to spend an hour repacking them into four double-lined paper ones that she’d brought herself. Each bag was first lined with two boxes of tissues and then a complex Hamburger Helper — Fruit and Veg — Frozen Dinner rotation. My manager would sometimes ask her to leave for no other reason than she made us all a little sad.

Then there was The Mystery Pooper who would periodically do a hit and run in aisle 8. The store manager devised a “Code Brown” announcement for the store intercom and I thanked my gender-biased stars that I was confined to the tills and not on cleanup crew.

But my favorite were Brother and Sister McBareFeet. They were about 6 and 8 years old and would come in unaccompanied once a week to get a gallon of milk, a dozen eggs, two bags of potato chips and a pound of ground beef with their mom’s food stamps card.

One week, just Sister McBareFeet came in and marched straight to the bakery. I diligently stared at the clock, the cashiers’ favorite passtime, until she reappeared at the end of my conveyor belt, holding a small white paper box and beaming. She smiled at me and reached up to place the box on the counter. I grinned back at her and reached down to take the $3.89 in moist bills and hot coins from her balled fist. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the box begin to teeter on the edge of the belt. The two of us seemed stuck in slow motion as the undecorated, 4-inch square cake emerged from the box and we could only watch as it fell face-down toward the floor.

I was the first one to tear-up after it landed with a splat. We stared at each other, both wide-eyed and I told her to go straight back to the bakery and get another cake, any one she wanted from the display. I set to work wiping up the smears of whipped sugar until she returned, looking utterly defeated and humiliated. I told her that it was on me and to have a good celebration.

Foodland was a funny place. It made me realize how unsanitary cash is and how risky some things in the dairy section are. (For every time you’ve ever encountered raw chicken in the bread aisle, I can assure you at least a quarter of it makes it back to the meat section.) But it brought to life the people in my community that would have otherwise been easy to dismiss and ignore.

They tore down Foodland a few years after I graduated. It’s now a vacant lot.