My Year As a Cashier



This peony flower looks tropical growing in front of my house!



             I just finished reading the book Malled by Caitlin Kelly, a memoir about how, due to the economic recession, her work as a professional journalist was no longer enough to support her or her fiance with a liveable income.  Even though she had been writing for papers like The New York Times, jobs became fewer and far between. She then turned, out of desperation, to the world of retail, and worked as a sales associate at The Northface, an upscale outdoor clothing store in a mall near the New York suburb where she was living.  This book, then, is an anecdotal telling of what that year was like working at a $9-an-hour job alongside other college grads who were just as desperate to make a living.
            As I read about her experiences, I couldn’t help but compare them to my own in 2000-2001 when I took a leave from teaching and worked as a deli cashier at Piccadilly Market, a restaurant, bakery and deli here in Wichita.  I saw, too, what is was like to return to earning a low hourly wage, standing on my feet for eight hours a day and doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again.  At the time, I was also reading the popular book, Nickel and Dimed, by columnist Barbara Ehrenreich, a writer who had gone undercover for a year to see if she could make a living on low-wage jobs.  While I found that some of my experiences were similar to that of both of these authors, they were also markedly different.  Here are some thoughts I took away from “my year as a cashier”:

Many low-wage workers and their work are invisible to the rest of us.  Not only do I mean that customers may look through them and fail to think of them as human beings, but I also agree with Ehrenreich that many service jobs are done out of the sight of most people – early in the morning (newspaper carrier), late at night (a janitor cleaning offices) or the maids making our beds and cleaning our toilet in a hotel room before we arrive.  I had to show up at 6 am and count the cash in the registers, make the coffee, grab bread from the bakery and prepare everything else in time to greet customers at 7 am (and I am not a morning person!).  Now I make sure to leave a tip whenever I stay in a hotel room and send money to our paper carrier at Christmas.

           Most customers were decent and friendly.  I do think this has a lot do with how I approached them as a worker, but by far, I found most people to be polite.  We had a lot of “regulars” at the deli, and I enjoyed the fact that I came to know about forty of them by name.  One man even gave me a five dollar bill every Wednesday morning, just for being there early to greet him!  As news of my pregnancy got out toward the end of the year, some of my retired people who came for coffee every morning showed up with baby gifts, and one couple even stopped by my house to see my newborn after I had quit the job!  Of course there were always the ones like the woman who, well-known in Wichita as an upstanding person, got disgusted with me when I asked for her driver’s license after she had written a check.  Then there was the man who always stood with a clenched jaw, looking above my forehead, and refused to tell me what kind of sandwich he had ordered, so out of fear I would just charge him for the cheapest one!
          It wasn’t the managers that were difficult; it was the other workers.  Unlike Ehrenreich, who made managers out to be heartless bosses that mistreated their employees, my experience was the opposite.  I can’t begin to name all of the workers that I saw come and go at that place within a year.  Our managers, who were generally kind and supportive, had a tough job on their hands.  They were dealing with a population who generally couldn’t be counted on to show up to work on any given day, who might call in from the county jail because they had spent the night in a holding cell, or, when they were at work, did as little as possible.  I remember the many times a new face appeared and energy was exhausted putting them through training, only to have them quit after a few weeks. Of course, I worked with some great people, but between the tedious scheduling and keeping the positions filled, the managers had a responsibility that I knew I never wanted.
         The work was hard, not only physically, but mentally!  When I was being trained, I knew that I would find it much easier to lecture to college students on the logical fallacies in argumentative writing than keep track of all of the ever-changing costs for hot deli foods or even up my cash drawer at the end of each day using a tricky computer program!  I am not good at procedures, and jobs like this are full of them. 
         Anyway, it was good to have that experience after working in the professional world.  I now know what it’s like to be behind the counter!
 
         For life is what you make it.  So make it good!