There are lamps, dim lamps, eight of them, sitting on posts that rise up just above everyone’s heads. When one of the lamps starts blinking it means that Chris has to go over there and scan his GreenMart badge and type in his employee pin.
This is what he does for all six hours of every single one of his shifts. He used to get a mix of shifts on the registers, on stocking, and on the self-checkout, but last month Helen decided that he should stay on self-checkout, on account of the recurring instances of his leaving stock on the aisle floors and the “prolonged empty stare” given to customers at the register.
When he was still pretty new at GreenMart, about six months ago, and the lamps blinked and he walked over to terminal, he always asked the customer what happened and she would tell him that she accidentally scanned something twice or that it thinks that she placed something in the bagging area without scanning it and Chris would quickly verify that she was telling the truth (that there was a duplicate on the screen or that there wasn’t something in the bagging area that wasn’t on the screen), but he gave up on that after a few weeks, because the self-checkout computers summon him via the blinking lamps so much, and it seems like they are always summoning him for no reason, and he just has to scan his GreenMart badge and type in his employee pin to get it to work, even though apparently nothing is wrong.
“WEIGH YOUR TOMATOES AND THEN TOUCH ACCEPT WEIGHT.”
There’s a scale under the bagging area, so the computer can keep track of how much weight has been added to the bagging area, and it uses this to try to catch unscanned items. If the computer feels the weight change without something being scanned, it complains in its horrible stilted cheery computer-woman voice. Or also there’s probably some database of the weights of all the products sold at GreenMart, and every time the customer scans something, the computer looks up the weight of the barcode, and computer compares it to the increase in weight in the bagging area, and then it will complain at you if it doesn’t match.
“TWELVE NINETY-FIVE.”
Most of the time, after the computer complains, you can carry on scanning after waiting a moment. It’s like it’s just a threat. But there is some opaque algorithm that Chris has not been able to decode in his months working self-checkout by which the computer will occasionally determine that your mismatching weight offenses are too extreme, and it will refuse to cooperate, as if it has lost its patience, until an employee is drawn to the blinking lamp and scans his badge and types in his pin, like a parent coming over to his toddler to tell him to share his toy.
“REMEMBER TO ALWAYS SCAN YOUR ITEM BEFORE PLACING IT IN THE BAGGING AREA.”
Most of the customers that come through simply show up and scan their stuff and pay and carry on with their days. Chris is supposed to make sure they aren’t stealing anything and say Have a nice day when they leave. But Chris has not ever noticed even a single suspicious person leaving self-checkout, let alone someone actually committing theft. If someone wanted to steal something, why bother going through self-checkout? Why would you put yourself in the purview of some employee who has nothing to do but watch you make your way through self-checkout? Anyways you’d have to like, pretend that you were paying for the thing you were trying to steal. Or actually pay for something else and just slip the thing you’re stealing into the bag. When you could also just walk out of the store with the thing you’re trying to steal and not go through the self-checkout at all.
How did someone get the idea that self-checkout would create new opportunities for people to steal? People walk out with merchandise all the time. The self-checkout lanes are basically just giving people the option to pay for the merchandise. All of the people in the self-checkout are volunteering to pay for their groceries. Why would you expect that the people going through the self-checkout are the ones trying to steal?
And so why is Chris here? Why does he need to scan his badge and type in his pin whenever someone angers the computer system? Why does he need to scan his badge and type in his pin whenever someone accidentally scans something twice? Are the customers not capable of fixing these things themselves?
When Chris stares at the lamps, the scene sort of dissolves and the background which is the ceiling of the supermarket becomes dark and fluorescent and the lamps acquire hard outlines and the dim yellow-white light of each of them becomes dark and unbearable, and his head starts to feel tight and narrow and when one of the lamps eventually (inevitably) starts blinking he has to try to loosen up and calibrate his vision back to the corporeal plane and the blanket of sterile white all over everything (the linoleum, the computers, the people’s faces) as he walks over to the lamp, carefully, as to not lose his balance on the tile. Standing underneath the blinking lamp is a heavy middle aged woman. Chris does not ask what’s wrong but she tells him anyway.
“I think I scanned the pasta too quickly and it got mad at me.”
“TWO NINETY-NINE.”
He takes the pasta out of the bag and looks at the display and sees that the last item scanned was marinara sauce, so he scans the pasta again.
“FOUR THIRTY-TWO.”
And then he puts the pasta back in the bag.
“I already scanned that,” the woman says.
“Yeah, it didn’t register because you scanned it too quick.”
“PLEASE TAKE YOUR RECEIPT.”
“I’m going to get charged for two boxes of pasta.”
“No, it’s only on there one time. The first time didn’t, like, register.”
“But the computer beeped.”
“Sure, but look, the pasta’s only on the screen one time.”
“SIXTEEN OH FIVE.”
“I don’t have any idea what is says on the screen. All of the names that show up on there aren’t even complete words, it’s all jumbled nonsense, it doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“I know what you mean, but this is the pasta right here, the last thing on the list, see, it says ‘Barilla’, and that’s the brand of pasta, Barilla, and there’s only one of them on the screen, so that means you are only going to get charged for one box.”
“TWENTY-ONENINETY-NINE.”
“I’m pretty sure this is fettuccine, not brilla.”
Chris looks at the lady for a second. Then he scans his badge again, types in his pin again, and removes the pasta from the computer.
“PLEASE CONTINUE SCANNING.”
“Okay, I took it off.”
“ONE FIFTY.”
“Okay, thanks.”
“UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA.”
“PLEASE WAIT. HELP IS ON THE WAY.”
Chris scans the driver’s license of a man who is around retirement age so the computer will let him pay for his six pack of Coors Light. He types in the code for lemons for another man because the code that’s programmed into the computer for the picture that comes up when you type in “lemons” is out of date and so when you press on the picture of the lemon the lamp starts blinking. He replaces the roll of thermal paper at self-checkout register number four and the woman waits patiently as he does so with her half gallon of milk because the computer won’t let her pay until the paper is replaced, and then she doesn’t take her receipt when she leaves.
He scans his GreenMart ID and types in his pin without then doing anything in particular a hundred times throughout the day, because there isn’t anything in particular that needs to be fixed, but it must be done anyway, just to appease the computer so that it will allow the customer to move on with his or her day.
When he is not interacting with the computer terminals he is standing near the exit of the self-checkout area, his eyes slightly upward and unfocused towards the lamps, past the lamps, through the lamps, and he’s not saying Have a nice day to the customers as they leave. He’s trying to make sure he doesn’t fall through the floor. He’s trying to will the lamps and the ceiling into resolution. He’s trying to tease the ambient sound of the supermarket apart from the light coming from the buzzing fluorescent panels on the ceiling and the whiteness that bounces up off the linoleum and the soft incandescence of the lamps above each of the self-checkout computers. He’s trying to figure out if the hum and the glow are in fact two different things. He’s concentrating on these things until one of the lamps starts blinking again and he must quickly grab hold of the real world, and he is always just able to get a grip, and he takes a step and he is relieved to find that the floor is still solid.