Kroger Cashier
The summer after my senior year of high school a couple of friends and I got jobs at Kroger. Two of us became cashiers and the other ended up working in the Deli. Kroger seemed like a good gig. They were always hiring and because they had recently unionized it was one of the few places a teenager could get that paid more than minimum wage.
I typically worked the afternoon and early evening. After work my routine was skateboarding once it got dark, spending the late night drinking bottomless cups of coffee at Denny’s, then sleeping in until noon the next day. Aside from my feet hurting from skating and then standing all day it was a good fit.
At first it was fascinating to see what different people bought. I remember being amazed at the quantity of food and the amount of money some spent on it. I was also surprised by how many people had assistance, it seemed like a quarter of the shoppers had either WIC or food stamps. It was always frustrating to trying to explain to some mom on WIC why they could buy one kind of cheese or cereal but not the other, I would just have to point limply to the pictures of qualified food on a laminated sheet. I also remember wishing I could choose to not sell things to people, like the guy who would come in once a week with terrible emphysema and buy a carton of camel non-filter cigarettes.
The novelty wore thin pretty quickly and the reality was that working as a cashier was repetitive and monotonous. I repeated the exact same motion, over and over again, the boop…boop…boop… sound of the scanner repeated a thousand times a day. After a few shifts there wasn’t much to learn and after a few weeks I’d memorized all the popular produce codes, 4011 for bananas, 4060 for asparagus, 4070 for celery, and so on. Being busy made the time seem to pass more quickly, but when it wasn’t busy it felt like time stopped. This effect was made worse by the display on the cash register screen, which showed the time, but only updated with each transaction. To fight the monotony I’d try to make it challenging, making a game out of how quickly I could scan an order without the scanner messing up, getting really efficient at bagging, or guessing how much an order was going to be before I started scanning. Regardless of the tactics it was boring, repetitive, and simple enough that anyone could do it, and now through the miracles of U-Scan self-checkout technology they do.
My plan was to work as much as I could that summer to save some spending money for fall when I started college. Instead, I found new ways to spend money. Every week when I got paid I’d buy a carton of cigarettes and a handful of lottery tickets because I was still excited about all of my new found privileges of being a legal adult. The cigarette expense wasn’t new, I’d started smoking when I was 12 and I’d been smoking a pack a day since I was 15. The other thing that was eating my paychecks was skateboard parts, CDs, and film. For my birthday at the beginning of that summer, my dad bought me an old Minolta 35mm camera and gave me all of his old lenses. This new hobby was expensive. I got an employee discount at the video store inside Kroger that also developed film at the counter, every payday I’d buy a few rolls of film and pay to develop the rolls I’d shot the week before.
By the end of the summer I’d saved almost nothing and I knew I’d have to get an on-campus job in the fall when school started. I put my notice in at Kroger 2 weeks before moving to Muncie, Indiana to attend Ball State.
