Picture a manager’s hell, and I don’t mean cashiers not doing their job. I’m talking about customers everywhere, all impatient to check out of the dusty store. The waste from customers and employees alike comes to the bladder that’s the front-end. The dysfunctional kidneys cause colonies of crumbs, sticky food wrappers, and odd-colored stains to remain on the floor - but the customers don’t care. They all line up; some with a small basket, and some with 2 carts full of food. Soon, people are waiting deep into the aisles, and the lines are almost as long as the intestines. With only two cashiers open, and 1 line for the manager to take orders, the Self-Checkout employee is forced to get off their tail.

You have to look around, trying to sniff out shoplifters. Despite shady customers being rare at Eurofresh, you had to be hell-bent on making sure every order ran perfectly - never mind the fact your head is spinning trying to focus on three registers at once! Your eyes dart from register to register, and, to your dismay, you find one beeping. Its flashing red light feels like it’s laughing at you. You run over to help, scan your associate’s card to shut the machine up and find a crabby customer confused on why they can’t find the code for an exotic fruit you’ve never seen in your life. Being next to the Customer Service desk and the managers, customers assume you’re their errand boy. They stomp over to you and demand you go and get the right deli meat for them because the deli department screwed up their order. You try to tell the customer that you can’t do that, and you need to stay by self-checkout, but then he throws his hands up in the air and says, “You should’ve done the upstanding thing and just got it for me!” 

The hours summarized the whole situation. You’d have to ask for your break, and hope and pray someone who hogs their break didn’t take your spot. Because, of course, cashiers didn’t deserve breaks on an 8-hour shift. On registers, you could lean or sit on the bagging station. And on self-checkout? You’d have to stand for hours on end staring at some customer failing to scan their eggs. Each toe would be on fire. The soles of your shoes would be worn out and covered in dirt and squashed raspberries. And, on top of working eight or nine-hour shifts, the best employee got the honor of staying late to help cover someone else’s shift. You’d feel bad for leaving your coworkers in the dust, so you stay late. Not counting the possible break, you could be stuck working at Eurofresh for 10 and a half to 11 hours. 

After my first six months, scanning produce, dealing with self-checkout, and greeting customers came as naturally as breathing through my mask. As one of the better cashiers at the store, I’d get lucky and be granted a chance to step away from self-checkout. The minute I closed the machines down, I’d run over to the in-person registers. That’s when any sense of fun began. At first, I didn’t know a single coworker since I lived in Mundelein and was working with Palatine kids. But, even then, we had a mutual connection: tiredness. My coworkers had to deal with crabby customers just like I did. They had to suffer ‘Karens’ demanding to see the manager. Their feet hurt like mine did, even with the chance to lean once in a while. They were disgusted by the disgusting dirt around the store. We would try to spark up a conversation about anything to forget where we were. We’d judge a customer’s bagging requests once they left, and dream over the same desserts the bakery had on sale. Most people would see us chatting, having the time of our lives just talking to each other, and think we were lazy. We’d scramble to our places or start bagging as if that was our intention in the first place. They all forgot what it was like being desperate to ignore the insanity they had to deal with. To work alone is to brute-force your way through problems; working together is a sense of relief. I’ll never understand why our managers worked so hard to split us up, and why other workplaces aren’t alone in that philosophy. Maybe they were too bitter from their lonely positions. They never grasped the fact that employees who got along meant a happier workplace.