The opinions of a supermarket employee

Thoughts from a supermarket employee:

1. Very few of us exist purely to make your life hell. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve worked with people who couldn’t give a shit about you as a customer. Some of them will be the friendliest people you talk to that day. They probably wish they’d never spoken with you. Most of us, on the other hand, are genuinely friendly and personable and would actually like to be able to help you. I find I get a smile for the next little while after I’ve talked to a friendly customer. Approaching me as though I’ll be friendly makes my day nicer; it’s possible it’ll do the same for yours.
2. Yes, checkout operators make very routine conversation. That’s because they stand there for at least five hours each shift, talking to people who often just want to hurry home. These customers are the good ones. The annoying ones are those that comment on your name, your hair colour or your accent. It’s like asking a man called Wyatt to repeat his name: they’ve probably heard it.
3. We have bad days. Sorry, but that’s how it is.
4. Please tell us if you drop something. We won’t get mad, but we will be able to avoid grief from our higher-ups. Cleaning up mess is a part of our job. Sometimes it’s one of the better parts, if only for the variety.
5. The toy aisle is not a crèche during school holidays. If you don’t want to take your children shopping, find a childcare centre or, even better, teach them to help. Most of the children I see with parents who involve them in the shopping come to enjoy the task and learn lots about numbers and words in the process.
6. Whenever Mum changes her mind about things she’s put in her trolley to buy, she puts them back on the nearest shelf, with the justification that there’s people who are employed to clean up the shelves. There are. They’re called nightfillers, and their main job is to restock the shelves as fast as they can. Most supermarkets keep them as late as they need to before the job is done. When they start after the store closes at 9, work as late as they need to and generally have another job, uni classes or school in the daytime, that extra minute of sleep that they’d get if they didn’t have to put stray soup packets back where they came from is very valuable.
7. Working at a supermarket doesn’t make us stupid. Well, maybe it does. But some of us are smart enough in the first place that it just dumbs us down a little, idiocy’s too far to go. My supermarket has people studying law, media, music, commerce, international politics and a number of students doing engineering. Between us, we can do pretty much anything, including good customer service if you give us a reason.

I expect most people have little things like these that make their days at work special, annoying or just generally interesting. Most people are very respectful about things like these, but at times supermarket employees seem to appear so pedestrian that they slip in under the radar and become more automaton than human to some eyes. Despite this, I actually enjoy my job most of the time. Most of that is because of the customers that make me smile, laugh or, occasionally, sing, giving me a reason to love what I do.

Edit: This is one of my buffer posts. I've quit that job now, so that I could do other new and exciting things which I will no doubt publish here in the future.