If You Don’t Have Anything Nice To Say…Get Out of My Line

Hi.
My name is Julie.
I’m a grocery store cashier.
I’m not especially happy about it, but it’s a job, and a job was exactly what I needed when I first donned the black vest with the picture of the piggy on it and asked, “Do you have a discount gold card?”
There are a few things you customers don’t know about me.
In your mind, I am an unintelligent, uneducated moron who can’t get anything better than a grocery store job.
You don’t know that I got my first book contract when I was 25, or that I’ve written for magazines, or that I went to college, or got a nearly perfect score on the verbal part of my SAT’s. You don’t know that, on the side, I work as a proofreader and an editor, and being a cashier is “my other job.”
I’m not telling you this to brag, only to point out to you that I am NOT a moron.

I don’t mind when you decide you don’t want something. I can take it back.
I don’t mind when you write a check. I don’t even mind when you write out the whole thing, even after I tell you the little machine gadget will print it out for you.
Sometimes I say “Hello!” or ask you how you’re doing and you completely ignore me. Obnoxious, yes, but I can handle it.
It doesn’t bother me that much when I ask you if you would like to sign up for a rewards card, and you react like I’ve just invited you to an orgy.
I hate it when you want paper vs. plastic, but I do it without complaint.
It irritates me when you are an able-bodied person and yet you expect me to load your groceries into your cart, but I DO IT, because I’m nice.

I may be having the world’s crappiest day, and I will still be nice to you.
I’ll help you find something, do a price check, and if you’re elderly, I’ll do everything short of changing your diaper. I’m a nice person, easy to get along with, and I WANT TO HELP YOU. I like people.

But when you curse at me because I put too many cans of cat food in your bag – when I very deliberately try NOT to overload bags and make them too heavy – that’s different. My name is Julie. It is NOT “f**king ass.” Get it right. If I didn’t desperately need my job right now – because the economy sucks and I’m not getting hours at the “main job” (the one where I don’t have to deal with the general public – yay!), I would have spewed out one of the many clever comebacks I had brewing in my brain for the rest of the evening.

All I’m saying is, be nice to the dumb grocery store cashier, because you never know who might be the only person who knows CPR when you’ve been hit by a car, and you never know when that cashier might just be a writer who someday writes about what a complete nutcase you are…and earns money off of it.

And if you haven’t had a new hairstyle since 1983, you smell like you smoked an entire carton of cigarettes in the car on the way to the store, and you resemble a parolee from the local county prison, you might want to think long and hard about who is the “ass.” Hint: IT’S NOT ME.

Thanks, and have a great weekend.