The Checkout Girl
TAZEEN AHMAD
My Life on the Supermarket Conveyor Belt

Dedication

For Cogs everywhere

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

Saturday, 8 November 2008

Sunday, 9 November 2008

Monday, 10 November 2008

Thursday, 13 November 2008

Friday, 14 November 2008

Saturday, 15 November 2008

Sunday, 16 November 2008

Thursday, 20 November 2008

Thursday, 27 November 2008

Friday, 28 November 2008

Saturday, 29 November 2008

Thursday, 4 December 2008

Friday, 5 December 2008

Saturday, 6 December 2008

Saturday, 13 December 2008

Wednesday, 17 December 2008

Thursday, 18 December 2008

Friday, 19 December 2008

Saturday, 20 December 2008

Tuesday, 23 December 2008

Saturday, 27 December 2008

Saturday, 3 January 2009

Sunday, 4 January 2009

Thursday, 8 January 2009

Friday, 9 January 2009

Saturday, 10 January 2009

Thursday, 15 January 2009

Friday, 16 January 2009

Saturday, 17 January 2009

Friday, 23 January 2009

Saturday, 24 January 2009

Friday, 30 January 2009

Saturday, 31 January 2009

Friday, 6 February 2009

Saturday, 7 February 2009

Friday, 13 February 2009

Saturday, 14 February 2009

Tuesday, 17 February 2009

Friday, 20 February 2009

Saturday, 21 February 2009

Friday, 27 February 2009

Saturday, 28 February 2009

Thursday, 5 March 2009

Tuesday, 10 March 2009

Friday, 13 March 2009

Saturday, 14 March 2009

Wednesday, 18 March 2009

Friday, 20 March 2009

Saturday, 21 March 2009

Monday, 23 March 2009

Wednesday, 25 March 2009

Friday, 27 March 2009

Saturday, 28 March 2009

Friday, 3 April 2009

Saturday, 4 April 2009

Friday, 10 April 2009

Saturday, 11 April 2009

Friday, 17 April 2009

Friday, 24 April 2009

Saturday, 25 April 2009

Friday, 1 May 2009

Saturday, 2 May 2009

Friday, 8 May 2009

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Copyright

About the Publisher

Prologue

Except for a short stint in a superstore as a student many years ago, my experience of supermarkets had been the same as most people’s; I’d rush in to complete the dull but essential chore that is the weekly shop, I’d have no time for checkout girls and their small talk. I’d rebuff offers of help tactlessly, make demands as though they were machines programmed to serve me without complaint, and promptly forget their names and faces seconds after rushing out. Little did I know that, behind the identity badges, unflattering uniforms and quiet smiles were individuals taking note of my every quirk, comment and foible.

Never again will I shop the same way. And neither will you.

When I began my six-month career as a checkout girl, the country was reeling from the possibility that we were headed for a full-blown recession. President Obama’s election brought new optimism around the world but could not disguise the doom and gloom that lay ahead. The credit crunch and financial instability were one thing, but in the early autumn of 2008 things were about to get rocky for every man, woman and child in this country—as we slid into the worst recession the world has seen for decades.

Until that point the main casualties of the financial crisis were the banking institutions—Northern Rock, Lehman Brothers, Citigroup, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with mortgage lenders and insurance companies. Most ordinary people were still watching developments from a safe distance. However, unemployment figures were creeping up, redundancies and job losses were looming and food prices were on the rise.

As a mother running a busy home and working in a volatile industry I had started to count my own pennies. My grocery shopping was now leaving my wallet disconcertingly light. I’d push my trolley to the car park while staring at the receipt, aghast that the food in my bags now cost well in excess of a hundred pounds: I knew I had to make cutbacks. It was after one such shopping trip, clutching my hefty bill, that I turned back to look at the checkouts and it dawned on me—this was the front line of the recession, where the reality of the downturn really hit home. And that’s how I embarked on my quest to see what a billion-pound hole in our economy would really mean for us all.

Someone, with not much time for reporters, once told me that ‘Journalists always report from the outside in and so only ever see the story from a superficial vantage point.’ My episodes of immersive, experiential or undercover journalism have allowed me the privilege of reporting from the inside out. This requires a degree of individual sacrifice, intrusion, duplicity and commitment that usually leaves me slightly unhinged. However awkward it is personally, thankfully it serves the purpose of shedding light on the truth in a way that turning up with my notebook, pen and press pass never could do. This is that truth.

Why did I choose Sainsbury’s? Actually it chose me. Last autumn, jobs in retail were hard to come by and I searched and applied for a number of positions in various supermarkets before this vacancy cropped up. I had to complete an in-depth online assessment and attend an interview: I got the job. In my first month, as the crisis deepened, I was convinced that, like many other retailers, the supermarkets would eventually fall victim to the downturn. I couldn’t have been more wrong. I sat at my checkout, week in week out, for six months observing first-hand how the nation was adapting to the onset of what would soon be described as the worst global recession since the 1930s. At first, customers were spending hard and most appeared unruffled by the storm brewing ahead. And then as the year drew to an end, I saw a shift: money-saving tactics kicked in, savvy food choices were being made, offers were hunted down and customers were watching the pennies carefully—the recession was starting to bite. I witnessed for myself how the average British family was suffering, as people opened up to me about their money troubles. And some didn’t stop there; I listened, mouth agape, as customers launched into full-blown confessions about their personal lives, divulging their most private thoughts.

To us they are just cogs in the supersonic wheel of our supermarkets, but Checkout Girls and Guys—or Cogs, as I secretly referred to them—have incredible stories to tell and intriguing interwoven lives of their own. Behind the tills, in the shopping aisles, across the customer service desk, beyond the doors leading to the back of the store and upstairs in the canteen and locker rooms, family dramas are played out, love affairs and friendships flourish and sometimes wilt. Here, several members of one family work together, along with friends who grew up together, neighbours, former school friends and flat-mates. At times it’s like a small, cosmopolitan village, at others like a big, bustling, multi-racial family. And on a daily basis they welcome us as shoppers right into the heart of their community while unwittingly becoming spectators to our personal and financial dramas. Against all my expectations I walked straight on to the set of a gripping soap opera in which all of us have a walk on part. The Cogs I met were in Sainsbury’s, but they are in every supermarket and in every town—and they are watching you. This is their story.

The Checkout Girl
Saturday, 8 November 2008

So here I am. Day One. My hair’s tied back, my shoes are low-heeled and sensible but even though I’ve got my orange name-badge on, I’m still me. That may be because I haven’t been given my bright blue polyester polo shirt and high-waisted, wide-bottomed, narrow-legged, creased-down-the-front trousers yet.

At Sainsbury’s, becoming a checkout girl or ‘Cog’ requires a two-day training course. Staff recruitment is serious business here, and as I wait in the canteen I’m given a quick summary of what we’ll learn today: the supermarket’s raison d’être, history, financial status, aims and objectives, health and safety rules and, most significantly, its guiding mottos:

‘Do you want your bonus? Then, always smile, take the customer to the product and offer an alternative. Above all, be friendly.’

The mantras are many in number and imprinted on beige-cream A4 pages, crumpling a little at the corners, stuck all the way up the stairwell. And right next to the clocking-in and (equally importantly for all supermarket workers) the clocking-out machine is a poster signed by shop-floor staff all promising to ‘smile more’, ‘be more helpful’, and ‘treat the customer like someone special’. These are the Cogs’ countless messages pledging allegiance and promising to be better at their jobs. It reads like a giant farewell card written by signees at gun point.

Our trainer finds it impossible to refrain from bragging about how well this store is doing.

‘The credit crunch has not affected us,’ we are told. ‘We are set to take a million by the end of this week,’ she crows, smiling smugly. ‘We’ve already taken £16,000 on clothes today.’ Her grin is now wider than a Cheshire cat.

We have to sign the contract on the spot and hand it back immediately. When I ask if I can get a copy, I am brashly told, ‘You’ll get one once Personnel have signed it,’ with no indication given of when that might be.

Sickness policy: There is no sick pay for six months and if you are ill you only get statutory sick pay.

Holidays: You need to book that now.

Overtime: Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to put in extra hours and swap shifts. ‘It’s a matter of “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours.”’

Breaks: One hour unpaid lunch for checkout staff if you do a full day. But depending on the number of hours worked this could be a fifteen-, twenty-, thirty- or forty-five-minute paid break. On top of lunch? Instead of lunch? I’m not clear and she doesn’t provide clarification either.

The locker comes at a deposit of £5, so technically that’s an hour from your pay docked already. And don’t even think about clocking in until AFTER you’ve been to your locker and are ready to head on to the shop floor.

Sainsbury’s is at the top of its game, she tells us. However, Tesco has inconveniently pipped it to the No. 1 post, and Asda, with its marriage to Walmart, has shoved Sainsbury’s into third place.

‘I don’t think we’ll ever be No. 1,’ says our trainer wistfully. ‘We compete with those two on price, but M&S and Waitrose on quality.’ Whispering for effect, she adds, ‘I shop at Marks and Spencer when I want something special, but some people actually come here for the same reason.’

We are told about the mystery customer who shops in the store to test the full Sainsbury’s experience. Today I learn that this supermarket’s philosophy is almost entirely defined by the Mystery Customer Measure (MCM), and the bonus that could line everyone’s pocket if they give the store the thumbs-up. He or she will come in twice a month and sample every single aspect of the store—the petrol station, the café, the toilets, the shop floor, customer service, checkouts. If the store gets an average rating of 80 per cent or more over a full period, everyone gets a small bonus. ‘We’ve had a couple of 80-plus per cents,’ we’re told. There are also additional incentives known as ‘shining stars’ for staff to go that extra mile to please customers. If the mystery shopper (or in fact any customer) mentions the name of a particularly helpful member of staff then a £10 voucher is awarded to the named employee. ‘Justin’—Justin King, Chief Executive of Sainsbury’s—‘has been so generous this year,’ we are told. ‘Above and beyond all the normal store cut prices, he’s given us an extra 15 per cent discount to shop with this Christmas. We’re being paid to take it away, basically.’

We spend the next few hours familiarising ourselves with the store layout and learn about the multiple ranges: Basics (cheap and cheerful), Taste the Difference (high-end foods), Different by Design (non-foods luxury range), TU (bargain-basement clothes), Be Good to Yourself (healthy range), So Organics (organic food). But getting to know my fellow Cogs is the most enjoyable part of the day. We are all struggling to swallow the corporate spiel we’re being spun. I have to admit that I had preconceived ideas as to who these people were, and they are certainly not what I expect: ex-professionals, trainee professionals and soon-to-be professionals. They include a law graduate who is going to travel for two hours each way to work the night shift, a middle-aged woman with a long and illustrious career behind her who, in tough times, cannot find another job. And then there is Rebecca, who I love after exactly zero point two minutes; a vivacious, petite redhead in her mid-thirties who battles to disguise her sarcastic deadpan sense of humour. She is training and working all week long and has taken on weekend work following a dramatic pay cut. She has two teenage sons to put through college soon so ‘needs must’ she tells me privately. Throughout the day, we catch each other’s eye when we should be paying attention and fight to stop ourselves from collapsing into a heap of giggles.

By the end of Day One, I’ve learned that those at the bottom of the rung have about as many rights as the frozen chicken sitting in aisle 33. And that, if I’m to believe what I’m told, the recession is as far from this particular branch of Sainsbury’s as the TU range is from haute couture fashion. But I look at my new colleagues and can’t help thinking that, for as long as the country is in economic meltdown, here on the supermarket floor is where the recession is really going to make its mark. The real victims are the new breed of supermarket staff created by this financial crisis.

Sunday, 9 November 2008

Induction Day Two does not transpire. Our trainer has sustained a neck injury and so we end up spending a day on the shop floor. A trolley full of health and beauty products, abandoned at the till, is pushed in my direction. My first task is to take each item back to its rightful home on the shelves, and soon going around in circles has me dizzier than a tail-chasing dog. It takes me a wet-behind-the-ears forty-five minutes to realise the best approach is to sort the trolley into different categories according to shop layout rather than pushing it back and forth up the same aisles again and again. When I attempt to return some chocolates to their home in aisle 24 I’m over-whelmed by an urge to shovel the entire packet into my mouth.

Next up, the customer service desk. After a few hours of agonising repetition I know that this is not the place for me. The refund, refund, refund nature of the desk means it’s no more than a factory. Chatting is out of the question and the customers are more irritable than Sir Alan Sugar after a round with his apprentice wannabes. By the end of the day, Anne-Marie’s unwavering courtesy, patience and total professionalism—in the face of hostile, grumpy and impatient customers—are awe-inspiring. She doesn’t crack once, works without pause and still manages to be polite and courteous not just to the customers but also to me, with my annoying questions. Occasionally I manage to show a customer to their longed-for product in the right aisle after walking in circles for several minutes with the customer in hot (confused) pursuit. The rest of the time I’m jotting product barcodes on receipts and devising reasons for why the goods were returned. I take note of the number of times people come over with bills where an item has been charged twice at the tills in error. After three hours doing this I am told that on Sundays you only get twenty minutes for lunch, so off I go muttering under my breath.

When I return there is still spare salt to rub in my wound. My new friend, Rebecca, and I are given what looks like a million leaflets detailing the in-store promotions—50 per cent off toys, 25 per cent off wine and 25 per cent reduction on TU clothing. We have to hand these to customers entering the shop. I spend the first ten minutes enthusiastically greeting every customer with an all-American ‘Hi!’ and the pressure to treat each shopper like a mystery customer is so intense that I find myself taking a seven-year-old to the card section and smiling obsequiously, you know, just in case. The zeal fades quickly though when there are no smiles, barely a hello in return, and without exception, no eye contact. Thankfully, I’m asked to return to customer service to help out. I can’t wait to be behind the desk again, but feel rotten for leaving Rebecca distributing leaflets. I tell her we’ll do a swap in ten minutes. After five minutes of guilt-ridden angst I find an excuse to get her back to help. Once she’s made her escape she’s willing to do whatever it takes to avoid leafleting and spends the next couple of hours loitering in the clothing department. Never again will I refuse a leaflet crumpled into my hand on the street and nor will I frown when I discover I’ve been handed five rather than just the one.

And then suddenly there they are. The words I’m dreading emerging from my own mouth and I’m hearing them after being here for less than two days. A young man is taken off checkouts, placed at customer service for five minutes and then promptly sent straight back to checkouts. ‘I hate this place,’ he mutters as he walks away.

Towards the end of my day, at 4 p.m., I’m asked to check if anyone wants help with packing. I run from till to till asking the checkout assistants if they need my help. They all smile politely and decline. I’ve asked most of them when one finally has the good sense to say, ‘Well, that’s up to the customer, isn’t it?’

Once I’ve recovered from my idiocy, one lady takes me up on my offer saying, ‘Only if you’re good at it.’ ‘It’s one of my life skills,’ I respond. She laughs, not realising that in this job it’s the only one that counts.

Later I help a young mum pack. She seems to have decided to clothe her entire family in the TU range. Struggling to find the right amount of money, she takes one T-shirt off the bill. Seconds after she’s said goodbye to me, I spot her at customer service returning the lot.

Rebecca repeats at least half a dozen times today, ‘I’ve got to get a job at Waitrose.’ But how will it be better? I find myself wondering.

Monday, 10 November 2008

I put my uniform on for the first time. I haven’t worn polyester since the eighties so it takes some adjusting to. When I look at myself in the mirror, I want to ask where the pasta sauce is. Unsurprisingly, Husband falls about in hysterics. Once he has composed himself he tries to take a picture. He’s laughing so hard the picture is blurred.

Today is till training. A solemn-faced, gum-chewing supervisor trains a few of us including Rebecca and Adil, from the general merchandise department, who has spent months avoiding his turn on the tills. During those six hours we learn about the slide, scan and pass technique that we’re told Sainsbury’s has developed to avoid staff getting back pain and attempting to sue the supermarket. We have to aim for seventeen items per minute (IPM); ‘If you don’t maintain it, we’ll find out,’ says our plain-speaking till trainer. All our actions are accountable; CCTV, electronic monitoring, assessments, secret observation, clocking in and out, customer and colleague feedback. With cameras in every nook and cranny there is no escape. ‘In places you least expect them,’ the trainer tells us ominously. Let that be a warning to us all. If they are doing their job, by now they must have caught me putting things back on the wrong shelves, sneaking off to the loos to send text messages, secretly sampling food and gossiping with Rebecca in quiet corners. In the bathroom there’s a sticker on the door with the contact details for a whistle-blowing helpline: If you see something wrong then say something right. One number. One website. Riskavert.co.uk/rightline. When she leaves us for a minute, Rebecca and I start singing Rockwell’s ‘Somebody’s Watching Me’. Yet, despite the ethos and attire, this isn’t the eighties and the message is clear: no one gets away with dragging their feet.

Our trainer talks coupons, reduced-price items, fruit-and-veg prices, cards, sub-totals, split payments, cash payments, fraud, removing security tags, till maintenance, voids, mistakes, price checks—by the end of it my brain sizzles from information overload. When it comes to Nectar cards, customers get two points for every £1 spent. After you’ve got 500 points, you get £2.50 off. By this calculation you have to spend £250 before you get a couple of pounds off. When I look at my own receipts I still can’t make head or tail of it.

At Boots you get four points for every pound spent and each point is worth one pence. Isn’t that a better rewards scheme than Nectar?

Adil is a super-bright young politics student who works here part-time. He gives me the lowdown after three years in the job: ‘This Sainsbury’s branch never used to take induction quite so seriously but things changed after the store failed a number of times on customer service. Sainsbury’s know they can’t compete with Tesco on value so they’re trying to compete on customer service.’

From an employee point of view, though, everyone I’ve talked to so far speaks highly about working here. ‘If you’re nice to everyone, everyone is nice to you,’ I hear, over and over again. I also overhear one young staffer tell another how intimidating they find their manager. All the managers are pretty intimidating; they charge down corridors, sour-faced and with little time for pleasantries. My direct manager, Richard, is the exception.

I’m to go back on Sunday for Day Two of my induction. Already I feel like I’m working here full-time.

Thursday, 13 November 2008

I am yet to have my ‘Think 21’ training—selling alcohol, fireworks and other age-restricted goods—so until then it’s the shop floor for what I now call ‘reverse shopping’. Sainsbury’s staff call it ‘shopping’—picking up the goods dumped by customers at the tills. Never again will I have a last-minute change of heart leaving a poor Cog to put the unwanted product back. The one three-quarters-full trolley I have takes me two whole hours. After staring aimlessly upwards in a vain attempt to find an aisle that looks like it might be home to the items in my trolley, I find myself going distinctly doolally. I spend more minutes than is healthy carrying cans of Air Wick air freshener, Fairy Liquid bottles, baked bean cans, 3-for-£15 DVDs, a size-16 leopard-print blouse, an over-priced cuddly reindeer and 2-for-1 cookie selection boxes. Despite asking for guidance, no shelf can be found for the truly homeless—the Peppa Pig umbrella, a bag of mixed nuts and raisins, the rogue Christmas light and Pantene shampoo for thick and glossy hair. They go back to the trolley by the supervisors post and next time I look they’ve vanished.

Adil gives me a heads-up on the mystery shopper.

‘They will always ask for something at the other end of the shop to see if you will just point them in the right direction or actually take them there—which is obviously what you need to do. That’s inside information—use it well.’

I get my chance today. A smartly dressed, well-spoken lady in her sixties approaches me while I’m loitering in the household cleaners’ aisle and asks me if we have any Christmas biscuits other than the ones in the aisle across from us.

‘Yes we do, at the other end of the sto—’ A moment’s hesitation and I know what’s expected of me. ‘I’ll take you.’

I’m not a hundred per cent sure I’m taking her to the right spot, but if I look confident enough I may just pull it off. As we walk from one end of the store to the other, I do the maths. She is definitely retired, which makes her a prime candidate for mystery shopping. I’d better do some talking.

‘Are you doing your Christmas shopping?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘I wish I had the foresight to do mine so far in advance.’

‘Oh, you’re probably too busy working. I know what it’s like. Before I retired’—BINGO!—‘I used to work for Sainsbury’s…in IT as a project manager.’ DOUBLE BINGO!

She tells me she was there for ten years. I take her to the aisle, show her the biscuits, ask her if she needs anything else and leave her to it.

Back to the trolley and more reverse shopping. A middleaged man asks if I can help him find a particular brand of toilet roll. I show him and ask if there’s anything else he wants. He grunts what may or may not have been a no. Even my toes curl when I cringe.

If I’m trying too hard, one of my fellow newbies isn’t trying at all. Young, dark-haired and plump, she sidles up to me with a customer close behind her.

‘I’ve only been here two weeks and this chap is asking if we have any walnut whips. Do we?’ she asks.

‘I’ve only been here a week—I don’t know.’

‘I don’t know what to do with him. Should I tell him to go to another shop?’

‘Maybe take him to customer service or a till captain?’ I suggest.

She wanders towards him and fobs him off.

Meanwhile, as I’m trying to locate the rightful home of Garnier hair conditioner, a Korean family stop me. It’s Dad, Mum and their teenage daughter.

‘We need something for her hair,’ says Dad. ‘What you recommend?’

‘Oh boy, I’m no expert but I’ll try.’

‘You know more than me, I’m sure,’ grins Dad.

‘What are you after—shampoo? Conditioner?’

‘Make her hair straight. It’s wavy.’

‘You want serum for her hair?’

‘No sticky, for straight.’

‘Oh, so you want sticky stuff to make it straight.’

‘No for straight, like this.’ He indicates using his hands that he wants her hair straight. And his English seems to have got progressively worse.

‘OK, so you want to make her hair straight, right?’

Dad looks at me with exasperation. ‘No.’

I look at her hair and it’s wavy and kind of frizzy. Why am I talking to her dad? This must be mortifying for her. I look her straight in the eyes.

‘You have wavy hair and it’s sort of flyaway, so do you want something for frizzy hair?’

Dad jumps in, ‘No, for the straight, to make it.’

I ask her again: ‘What are YOU after?’

‘I don’t know,’ she whispers.

‘Do you want shampoo…conditioner…mousse?’ Come on, girl, give me something. Anything.

She says nothing. They get fed up with me and send me on my way.

Before my shift started I did some grocery shopping. I picked up a packet of Country Life spreadable only to see a sign when I clocked in stating that it was being pulled off the shelves and we weren’t to let any customers buy it. I point this out to another Cog and she tells me to let customer services know. At the end of my shift when I take my butter back, they simply say it would not be scanable if it was withdrawn. They give me a refund and return to their conversation.

I catch my reflection pushing a trolley today and, for a second, think it’s someone else.

Friday, 14 November 2008

An item I pick up frequently at the tills is washed and ready-to-eat baby leaf spinach; another is ready-made steak pie. Both items are a reminder that the cook in the kitchen ought to try cooking. Customers are also putting in an impressive performance of pretending to purchase foods they have just sampled for free: they put it in their trolley at the samplers table and, once at the checkout, it gets swiftly dumped.

By the end of today’s shift I’ve broken every new rule I’ve been taught. I start putting things back in the wrong place, stop to peruse newspapers, sneak off to the loo to make a phone call. It feels good. And then I count down the hours in slots of ten minutes. That doesn’t feel so good. Fortunately, I manage to conjure up a new plot to get off the shop floor; I ask to shadow a checkout assistant. And that’s how I end up chatting to two checkout girls who speculate that I must be around nineteen. When I tell them how much older I am, they’re gobsmacked.

The older of the two Cogs, who is closer to my age, is alarmed that I’ve had my kids later in life. She had hers twenty years ago. Like all the other Cogs here, she is truly charming. I’m discovering a strong sense of camaraderie. People generally look out for each other here. It’s really quite startling. In this line of work, people are actually NICE.

Today, as on my previous few shifts, I witness staff doing their personal shopping just before they leave the store to go home. And now I know why. It’s the ultimate test of self-resolve to spend so many hours around food, clothes, toys, DVDs, gadgets, computer games—all the trappings of modern commercial life, and all placed to maximise their appeal. Not being allowed to touch, taste or sample any of it, makes me long for them even more. I find myself stroking clothes, squeezing fruit, inhaling deeply at the bakery—and then lingering longingly in the confectionery aisle while chocolate samples are being handed out to customers. Doing your shop at the end of a shift is the equivalent of finally gorging on a giant cream cake after being forced to stare at it on an empty belly for hours. Oh, it feels glorious.

Saturday, 15 November 2008

The first thing that happens on my shift blows apart my theory about customer service being wasted on the Brits. I help a woman to the car with her two trolleys’ worth of shopping and as we walk she tells me that she had stopped shopping at Sainsbury’s because it had become so expensive. But after one shopping trip to Morrisons, she promptly returned. ‘I don’t know what they do to you guys here, but everyone is so helpful and nice that I would never go anywhere else again.’ She admitted it was still pricier, but she was prepared to dig deeper so people were nice to her.

I spend about three hours doing reverse shopping, picking up hangers and security tags. When I’m ready to weep with boredom, I blag my way on to shadowing on checkouts again. This time with the lovely Maya. She’s been in the job for eleven years and says she took it as a temporary escape from the drudgery of her housewife life. She hasn’t looked back because it’s the one job she can just leave at the door. She says that the place has changed tremendously during her time, particularly on the checkouts.

‘We used to have packers, and someone doing all the running around, and there was none of the customer interaction—that’s all down to us now.’

Maya tells me the busiest days are when offers are on and at the weekends—although Dial-a-Ride (old people on a minibus) Tuesdays are also very busy. She points out that on those days it’s very slow in terms of IPM on which we all get scored. She is, however, fantastic at charming the most uptight of customers, and they cave in quickly.

At the end of the shift there is an impromptu security search—involving the lifting of collars, checking under badges and the removal of socks and shoes. As I empty my pockets, my notes and pen emerge and my heart skips a beat. I’m terrified they’ll ask to look at my notes, but they don’t.

Sunday, 16 November 2008

So far no references have been taken up—and I’ve been at the store for about a week. What’s become clear to me in that time is that here ‘colleagues’ (as everyone calls each other) are not only loyal to one another but incredibly loyal to the store too, even though they work their fingers to the bone. I’ve identified two groups of colleagues. The students, age range 16-23, work hard, earning money to get themselves through college; they mingle with the other students and shrug almost everything off with one-, sometimes two-syllable words. The other group is made up of older women in the 30-50 age group; they’ve had their babies, are done with housewifery, and want an easy job that gives them a bit of spare cash. They want to make some friends and work but are qualified to do little else. However there is also a third group emerging—a crop of credit-crunched professionals supplementing their incomes after suffering a pay cut or redundancy. Educated, articulate and with few other options, they find it humiliating and belittling and do it for no other reason than the cash. Despite being qualified and experienced, the recession has hung them out to dry.

We all congregate for delayed Day Two of our induction—and some of the others look brow-beaten. I think they’ve had a tough week. We’re told about ‘the rumble’. Every day from 11.30-12.30 and 15.30-16.30 ‘everyone, and that means everyone’ goes to one department and helps them get their goods on to the floor. I want to ask who is left on checkouts, security and customer service, but don’t dare.

Again it is drummed into us that customer service is our TOP priority. Our main aim, we’re told repeatedly, is to be as helpful as possible—and to always offer an alternative so that customers don’t leave empty-handed. I keep schtum about the elderly gentleman who came in hunting for maternity pads for the daughter who had just given birth. I sent him off to Mothercare. We’re also told to imprint the acronym ‘REACT’ in our minds every single time we deal with a customer—Receive the message, Empathise, Ask questions, Consider options and Tell them the result. We’re reminded that it’s paramount that we keep ourselves looking clean, tidy, have our hair tied back and frequently wash our hands. There are unkind giggles when they talk about someone with a bad BO problem.

Today I also found out that the Mystery Customer Measure makes up only a small amount of the bonus and is based on the availability of produce, and the amount of wastage. The less we waste, the higher our score.

I also discover other trade secrets, the kind that some customers have become aware of—food rotation (longest life at the back) and price reductions just before the end of the day (which explains why so many customers pile in during the evening).

According to the trainer, our uniform is changing. At the moment it’s blue and orange, but from April next year it will come into line with the rest of Sainsbury’s and we’ll be wearing purple and orange. I’m assuming though there’ll be no escape from the polyester.

The most important part of today is our ‘Think 21’ training. We have to ask ourselves if anyone buying age-restricted goods looks under twenty-one. If in doubt, ask for ID. I never carry any age-specific ID and wonder how many people do. The trainer tells us people will try to persuade and cajole, get angry and joke their way into making us sell restricted products to them. But the consequences are no laughing matter: prosecution, a criminal record, a fine and disciplinary action. During the course of the training, I decide to adopt two rules of thumb: if they look like they could work in the store under the student category—ask for ID. And if they have wrinkles, they are probably old enough.

And if we’re not frightened enough by the consequences, we’re told about ‘Jake Edwards’ who sold alcohol to an underage customer. Unfortunately for him, trading standards were testing the store. He faced a criminal charge, had to go to court, lost his job and, worst of all for him, was unable to travel to New York with his girlfriend on holiday. There are gasps all round.

Next on the training agenda is shoplifting. Another acronym—SCONE—explains the tactic used by shoplifters. They Select, Conceal, Observe, No payment, Exit. No one else points this out, but it’s obvious to me that shoplifters are taking advantage of Sainsbury’s desperate attempts to please its customers by working in twos. While one distracts the shop assistant with questions, the other Selects and Conceals.

And on the list of most desired items by shoplifters are the usual suspects—alcohol, CDs, beauty products and…meat. At certain times of year, lamb is apparently so expensive, a shoplifter will sneak it under their jumper with a view to selling it on later. I ask repeatedly how and where this black market in lamb operates. There is no response.

Then there is the ‘red route’ which we are all expected to walk during our shifts—via electronics, DVDs and CDs and past the beers, wines and spirits before heading up to the canteen for break-times. ‘Keep your eyes open and look out for shoplifters.’

Sainsbury’s is trying to up its green credentials. At the moment they play good guy to M&S’s bad guy on the plastic bag front. People are furious about having to pay for plastic bags there. Sainsbury’s keeps bags behind the tills until someone asks, but sometime next year bags will be gone from behind the tills, then they will have to be paid for, and eventually they will disappear altogether.

Thursday, 20 November 2008

Two weeks after I started, I am finally on checkouts. At first I just shadow and then I’m thrown in the deep end. I am slow and make mistakes, and most of time I’m too intimidated to apply Think 21. But as with my first attempt at parasailing, after the horror of being flung several hundred feet into the sky subsides, the adrenaline kicks in—and I’m high as a kite. I chat to strangers with the confidence of a teen drunk. My small talk is gauche and unrefined but it hits the mark for the few minutes every man, woman and child spends at my till. Through my checkout comes a recent widower who is struggling to shop alone, a young mum, her terrible toddler and a lot of impulse buys, an older mum accompanied by tetchy teenagers with many 3-for-2 offers, and a couple of middle-aged men with an extraordinary amount of chocolate.

At 3.30 p.m. there’s a brief hiatus around the school-run time. Some of the till captains don’t like staff sitting around doing nothing, even for a moment—Samantha is ready to take me off and send me on a reverse shopping trip when it gets busy again. During the afternoon I’m handed yet more mystery customer paperwork to read. It reiterates that we have to be nice, polite and chatty.

The first offer of overtime comes my way today and I turn it down. Overall it’s quieter than I expect. ‘Around the corner, a new Asda has opened up,’ a customer tells me. Another checkout girl tells me it’s quieter this year than last.

That evening I watch a documentary on BBC2 about the beneficiaries of the credit crunch—the discount supermarkets. Lidl and Aldi claim customers can do their weekly grocery shopping with them for half the price it would cost them elsewhere. The secret of their success is no frills, stocking their own brands, making the packaging similar to well-known brands and selling non-food items. The king of Aldi says he keeps prices low by only stocking one type of cornflakes: he thinks customers in other supermarkets are simply paying for the privilege of looking at six varieties.

Giants in the supermarket world must be anxious about the fact that 55 per cent of us now visit discount supermarkets. We’ve known for a while that Tesco is trying to fight back; Sainsbury’s is keeping itself in the running by price-matching them. Fortunately for the higher-end supermarkets, customers do still like premium brands. However, after watching the programme I’m convinced that if people do start cutting back, Sainsbury’s are really going to lose out. Their focus on quality and customer service rather than lower prices seems counterintuitive as the recession grips.

Thursday, 27 November 2008

After my first few days on checkouts, the patience of the till captains has run dry. One of them, Barbara, barely makes any eye contact and rarely answers my questions. I’ve learnt that her steely exterior and no-nonsense attitude coats a tough-love approach—she wants newbies to learn by being thrown in the deep end. I’ve watched her charge around the store like she owns the place and, as she’s been here for aeons, she probably does.

Susie’s friendliness is skin-deep—she’s tired of my inane questions. To start with she would smile kindly even when I asked for the third time how to do a split payment. She’s always polite and has a gentle, amiable manner which makes her popular with the Cogs. Recently though her grin has started to look strained when I beckon her over. I’ve come to dread having to call for any of the supervisors.

On the up-side, the aisles are filled with the sound of neighbourly love. An elderly lady is shopping for an infirm neighbour, a young woman has left work early to shop for her dad laid up with flu, one man is helping his blind brother shop.

Today news breaks about the collapse of Woolworth’s and I eavesdrop on a couple telling another customer how devastated they are by the news.

‘It’s a part of our culture and landscape. I grew up with the shop and so did my kids.’

‘Yes, but do you know what the worst part is? Supermarkets will now be able to charge whatever they want.’

One person with no concern for price hikes is a well-maintained woman in her forties. Her two shopping trolleys carry what she tells me is her fortnightly shop. It takes forty-five minutes to put it through and costs just under £600. When I give her the grand total she doesn’t flinch and hands over her credit card with a voucher for 75p off her fabric conditioner. I ask if she has a big family but she says there are only four of them. Other colleagues around me are staring at her food going along the conveyor with wide-eyed awe. Standing right behind her, and in my line of sight, is a colleague with arched eyebrows mouthing incredulous expletives.

Friday, 28 November 2008

I’m on a basket checkout today and mince pies, Christmas decorations, gifts for loved ones are all starting to pass across my till now. There’s not so much time for chat—due to the huffing and puffing of impatient customers congregating in the queue here because they want to get out as quickly as possible. I know they don’t want to make small talk, but there is a supervisor hanging around nearby and I wonder if she is assessing me. And so I talk.

As during my previous shifts, I find myself chatting to customers about the price of things and affordability. At least a couple of times a shift, this line of chat is followed by hushed, embarrassed queries about vacancies at the store. Today a woman in her fifties asks straight after telling me how expensive she is starting to find grocery shopping. An hour or two later, another shopper about to start training as a police officer asks me about Christmas vacancies. I’m convinced that £6.30 an hour won’t go very far for the likes of them, but I’ve got to be wrong.

Despite the number of people complaining about the price of things, almost eight out of ten customers, with a big basket or trolley full of shopping, tell me they had just popped in for one thing. One guy tells me he’s a sucker for the subliminal marketing and product placement. Almost every customer comes to my till laden with reduced bakery items, cut-price clothes and cheap booze. And then gasps at the total.

One customer tells me today that the Morrisons in town is heaving because of the discounted whisky. ‘It’s much cheaper than yours—and it was much busier in there.’ He’s got a point. For a store that claims not to be bitten by the credit crunch, it doesn’t feel all that busy. There are definitely busy times, but usually there tend to be no more than three to four customers waiting on basket tills and one or two on the trolley tills. And when it’s quiet, it can be very quiet.

There is a fundamental difference between the customers coming to basket tills compared to the trolley ones. Baskets seem to attract men in the 30-50 age group who offer grunts rather than actual words in reply to my (usually futile) attempts to chat. They only ever purchase a couple of items, one of which is, invariably, Lynx deodorant.

Truth be known, I’m scared witless of this type of customer and usually give up at the first hurdle. But today, when a grumpy thirty-something comes my way, I decide I won’t let him go without a fight. He cracks and before I know it he’s telling me that he has no plans for the weekends in the lead-up to Christmas, otherwise he won’t be able to afford festivities this year. Somehow, though, he’s convinced it’s going to be his cheapest Christmas yet. ‘There are going to be price-cuts galore over the next few weeks. PC World, Curry’s, M&S, John Lewis—they’re all either in trouble or having big sales early, so as far as I’m concerned it’s a win-win situation.’

Although he turns out to be very pleasant, if I am too slow for the blokes in this age group they bellow like animals preparing for battle. When I need help from a till captain, one charmer shouts from the back of the queue, ‘I only got in this queue because I thought it’d be quicker.’ This is met with a rumble of approval from the other men waiting in line. One man throws his basket down and storms off.

And then a young Asian guy wearing a shirt that is so tight the button sitting at mid-chest level looks like it may pop and fly straight into my eye puts two bottles of Bacardi down on my till. I look at him, take a deep breath and ask for some ID.

‘You’ve got to be kidding!’

‘I’m sorry, you look so young.’

‘I don’t carry ID,’ he says, turning himself away from me defensively and rolling his eyes.

‘OK, let me just get a supervisor.’

There are loud groans from the queue. The man behind him barks: ‘Just serve him—he looks over twenty-one.’

Two women join in the blood sport taking shape before them. ‘I’d sell it to him, he looks much older than twenty-one.’

Bolstered by the support of fellow customers, he turns himself back to me and snaps, ‘What’s the matter with you? I’m old enough.’ His frown is now menacing.

‘I’m sorry,’ I whisper pathetically. ‘Take it as a compliment.’

‘Look,’ he says, pulling up his shirt. ‘I’ve got tattoos.’

I stare at his chest and a large, dark blue scythe stares back at me. And still there is no till captain.

‘Just sell it to him.’

‘Job’s worth.’

‘I got two kids. I’m married. I got me own business.’

I repeatedly push the supervisor button and get up on my feet to see if I can get ANYONE’s attention.

Eventually the supervisor arrives.

‘It’s fine.’

He then turns to the customer and in an act of bloke-to-bloke camaraderie says, ‘It’s all right, I’m from around here.’ They both laugh and the supervisor leaves.

As for the now riled-up customer, it’s far from over. After paying, I notice he hasn’t packed his bottles. I ask if he wants a bag.

‘What do you think?’ he growls sarcastically. ‘It won’t be a very good idea for me to go back into work with those, would it?’ He aims this not at me but his supportive audience behind.

I bite my lip until I can almost taste blood. I try to explain the scale of the consequences for me but no one is listening.

The only thing that stops the shift from being a total disaster is meeting the trolley boy with an awesome ability to recall any random fact. When I say any—I mean ANY.

Saturday, 29 November 2008

My till-side view of every customer’s shopping is a privileged intrusion and lends itself to the worst kind of cod psychology. Take the single woman in her thirties buying the one carrot, a single onion, minced beef, a giant bar of Dairy Milk and a glossy magazine. I can already see her night in with dinner-for-one followed by chocolate and HELLO! for dessert. The man with the heavy bags under his eyes quietly purchasing breast pads, sanitary towels and painkillers for the new mum at home is totally knackered. The lonely middle-aged man with a penchant for red wine, who gets through a bottle a night (I know this because he’s back every couple of days for more). The pensioner with the sweet tooth, too proud to ask for help with packing her shopping, who will struggle to unpack when she gets home. By the time they get through my till, these shoppers have unintentionally shared some of the most personal moments of their life with me. In many ways I know them better than they know themselves. Sometimes it’s fitting to talk, other times I can tell this is their five minutes of peace. Either way, watching their shopping come through my till is invasive enough.

Despite the numerous reports on ready meals and the health implications, I’m still alarmed at the number of people who rely on this as their main meal for the evening. Indian meals are the most popular. I want to blurt out my recipe for a curry that’s quick, easy to make, delicious and nutritious. If it weren’t for the risk of getting sacked, I’d be distributing it surreptitiously to every customer on laminated cards.

Today my till is empty for a few moments, and I watch a man in his fifties approach a checkout adjacent to mine that is still serving someone with a huge amount of shopping. I indicate that I am free—and he shakes his head. ‘I’m all right here, love.’

He has to wait a full five minutes before he gets served and I soon know why. The Cog at the next till is his favourite checkout girl. He can’t wait to talk to her and is positively bouncing on his heels by the time she picks up the belt divider and scans his first item.

He may be too distracted by her blonde hair, big smile and undivided attention to worry about money matters, but others are not so easily fooled. They see the cost of their weekly shop pop up on the little screen right in their eye-line and it’s no exaggeration to say that they are but two shopping extravaganzas short of a cardiac arrest. Three customers coming through my till in just the one hour stop dead in their tracks when I announce their bills of £104, £85 and £60.

‘In the past my weekly shop would cost £100, now it’s much closer to £140. And that doesn’t include my daily trips to Tesco, where I’ll easily spend an average of £10-15,’ says one, sighing as she searches for her credit card.

Another gasps, ‘Oh my goodness, I only came in for some potatoes.’

‘Why didn’t you stop there?’ Aside from Sainsbury’s marketing working its magic on her, I’d really like to know what possessed her.

‘Well, If you’ve got to have it, you’ve got to have it,’ comes the reply.

The words of one of the other newbies ring loud in my ears. ‘Recession or no recession, people do have to eat.’

My personal distraction today is a problem with childcare. I need to ask for a change in shift pattern. I have my four-week assessment next week and I’m keen to see if Sainsbury’s is likely to accommodate my circumstances and if it really is the family-friendly employer it claims to be. My boss has thus far been nothing but charming, courteous and accommodating. The other checkout girls are devoted to him, so let’s see how he handles my request. It’s a make-or-break situation for me, so fingers crossed.

Spending the entire day at the till watching food, clothes and other goods go through is a bit like watching one long Sainsbury’s advert. I’ve started greedily making mental lists of all the things I MUST get before I go home. So today at the end of my shift I find myself shopping AGAIN. It’s the fourth time I’m doing it. I bump into another checkout girl, Michelle, doing exactly the same.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she says. ‘It’s the end of our shift and we’re both still here and SHOPPING.’

‘I’m doing it after every shift! I don’t get it.’

‘Me too, and how easy is it to spend the money we’ve just earned in just one shop.’

As I make my way to the checkouts, an annoyingly sprightly twenty-year-old, Louisa, who started around the same time as me, is bragging about her first shining star. Bill, the checkout boy next to her, tells her he gets one on every shift.

As I walk away from the brag-fest, I wonder why I haven’t got one yet. I’m doing OK, aren’t I? Should I up my game?

I go home with an aching upper body. I’m developing checkout arms. All the sliding, scanning and passing is giving me bulging biceps. Madonna, eat your heart out.

Thursday, 4 December 2008

People shout at me today. Actual shouting. One customer yelled at me within ten minutes of my sitting down at the till. Congregating are the usual grim-faced male clientele. They are angry and are sketching out evil plans while they wait. With this much tension in the air I struggle with split payments, mobile top-ups, vouchers and discount cards. It’s been five days since my last shift, and I can’t remember a thing.

Then my pin pad starts playing up so I can only take signed receipts. I take a couple and today’s till captain, Clare, tells me it’s OK to continue. I’ve learnt quickly that anything goes on Clare’s shift. I’ve never seen her rush for anything and she has just the one facial expression—a permanent just-awoken-from-deep-sleepy-slumber look. I like her laid-back approach, but I’m sure she’s often giving me the wrong instruction.

When my till crashes, it starts looking as though Sainsbury’s is going to be brought to its knees by my incompetence. I raise my head above the till to see if I can get the attention of a supervisor and there is no one in sight. Meanwhile there is unrest amongst the growing mob before me.

It makes perfect sense, of course: place the inexperienced, unconfident, rabbit-stuck-in-headlights Cog on the most complex and pressurised tills at the other end of the store and watch her die a slow and painful death. Well, if nothing else it’s good entertainment. I punch and thump my till aimlessly, offering drivelling apologies. And yet no one, least of all me, is going anywhere. Eventually I muster the courage to tell the growing queue that it will take a few minutes to sort the problem out and they should go to another till.

Everyone grumbles loudly and starts to move away. But one man seems to be turning into the Incredible Hulk. Steam emerges slowly from both nostrils and ears, and I’m quite sure he is turning green. Within moments he explodes and bellows: ‘FOR GOD’S SAKE—JUST SORT IT OUT. CALL THIS CUSTOMER SERVICE? WHY CAN’T YOU LOT JUST DO YOUR JOBS? YOU GET PAID ENOUGH, DON’T YOU?’ Everyone in the store has stopped in their tracks and I see a long line of checkout girls stretching their necks above their screens to get a better view.

I blush, stammer and punch my till for want of something…anything…to do. This is pure unadulterated humiliation and to survive it I force myself into an out-of-body experience. As I listen to the man rant, I watch from above and see the dud till with no supervisor bell attached and my panic-stricken arm pitifully waving in the air attempting to attract the non-existent attention of the non-existent till captains. I’ve been thrown to the wolves and they are making packet mince of me.

And then, just as I’m preparing to dig a hole in the concrete floor beneath my feet, Tracey, the saviour of countless Cogs before me, emerges like Aphrodite from the sea. Her sixteen years on checkouts has given her admirable patience and rhinothick skin. She pacifies the raging customer and ushers him towards another till, returning seconds later to fix me.

The till I’m moved to is also half-dead. I wonder momentarily if this is an initiation ceremony and that in some small room upstairs video footage is rolling in CCTV cameras, with managers huddled around it (along with the missing supervisors) all falling about laughing.

I continue to take signed receipts by the dozen until a supervisor shift change, when Samantha tells me I shouldn’t be taking these at all. It’s a no-brainer—most signatures on the cards have faded. I tell-tale on Clare immediately, knowing that even if it does get back to her she’ll be too out of it to care. Samantha barely acknowledges my blame-shifting. I recall Susie telling me last week not to take signed receipts but I’ve learnt if you don’t tailor your checkout etiquette for the till captain on duty you’re asking for a lifetime on the baskets.

My mood lifts a little when the trivia-obsessed Trolley Boy stops off to collect the empty baskets at my till. He immediately makes a beeline for a young male customer and asks him straight up who directed Scarface. The customer shifts uncomfortably and moves closer to the till. Trolley Boy is no quitter, so he questions him on a different film. This time the customer gives him a mumbled answer but makes no eye contact. This is straight out of Little Britain. I suppress a giggle as the young man, still seriously uncomfortable, and still without any eye contact, unexpectedly asks Trolley Boy to name Tarantino’s last three films. Trolley Boy replies without hesitation, takes the baskets and leaves.

The new VAT reduction means colleagues have been working flat-out to change prices on shelf labels. I’m not sure how many they’ve achieved, however customers are pleasantly surprised when I announce their total bill. Even a tiny 2.5 per cent can make all the difference—it’s true, every penny does count.

Price comparison website MySupermarket.co.uk has been suggesting that this year people ought to shop around to keep their Christmas costs down. Everyone I suggest this to says that they are not going to run around a number of stores just to save a couple of pounds, particularly as their transport costs will mean it ends up costing the same.

Michelle is in today—shopping again. It’s her day off but she says she ‘needed some bits and pieces’. She comes to my till and tells me how difficult she’s finding being away from her twin three-year-old daughters and wishes she had only agreed to do two days. Her childcare arrangements aren’t working out; she has a childminder she’s not keen on. I suggest she talks to management, but she seems uncertain, makes noises about the probationary period we are on and the risk of losing our jobs. It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.

I keep serving beyond the end of my shift. Noting that there are no supervisors coming to close my till, eventually I turn to the growing crowd and say, ‘I’m sorry, I’m closing after this customer, can you go around to the other till?’ indicating the adjacent basket till.

‘NO!’ yells a chic, cropped-hair-do fifty-something. ‘You are NOT going to do that. I don’t care if you are closing or going home, you WILL serve me.’ The others in the queue stare blankly to see what I’ll do. Before I get a chance to stammer a reply, the man in front of her starts to shoot orders at me. I die a slow death as he first orders me to help the old man in front of me open a bag. He then tuts loudly at my having the audacity to close my till when there are people to serve. He grabs his change from my hand and charges off like I have some unspeakable disease. I want to tell them that, while I am a mere Cog, I also have a life, home and kids to get back to. But in the manner to which I have very quickly adjusted, I say nothing. In the supermarket world, the customer is king. And so, with my head down, I serve all ten while listening to them debate my temerity as if I was no longer in the vicinity. The humiliation is complete. Eventually my cranky captain, Betty, comes over to tell me she will send relief and tells me I should have closed my till as soon as my hours were up.

I feel punched in the guts tonight. I’ve learnt the true nature of the British shopper: they know that kicking up a fuss loudly and aggressively will get results. And having an audience helps, because mobs rule. I stare longingly at the beers, wines and spirits section as I walk back through the shop.

I leave a message for Richard again, saying I need to speak to him. Betty says (unconvincingly) that she will pass it on.

Friday, 5 December 2008

As I drive in, I listen to a radio phone-in about the collapse of Woolies after ninety-nine illustrious years. Callers talk nostalgically about the bric-a-brac, mix-and-match cups and saucers, giant chocolate Dairy Milk bars and pick and mix. Why will they miss this stuff? I ask myself. It’s all available in supermarkets, anyway. Maybe that’s why Woolies collapsed—the supermarkets can now easily offer everything that made Woolworths unique.

As I walk to the supervisors’ post, I say fifteen Hail Marys, two Quranic passages and the Buddhist mantra I picked up in RE in the hope that some god, any god, may be listening. Let me not be on the basket tills, please.

The first thing that happens is Betty confronts me aggressively.

‘Did you take the till key home with you last night?’

‘No…I gave it to the guy who replaced me.’

‘Well, it’s gone missing, and you had it last.’

I say nothing, wondering where this is going.

Another till captain approaches and Betty asks her if she knows where the key is.

‘It’s hanging in the cupboard.’

Betty says nothing and looks away.

They allocate me my trolley till and, as I walk towards it, Betty tells me there’s no chair at my till. I take that to mean that I’m expected to stand for four hours, which is against health-and-safety rules on checkouts. I manage to locate a chair myself and am soon good to go. Just as I sit myself down, in front of a long line of customers, I fall ungraciously to the floor. After the last couple of days, I know that if I don’t laugh I will cry—and so I laugh hard.

I’m starting to get some regulars now. There’s a really scruffy-looking guy who comes in wearing threadbare clothes. He’s a man of few words but has said enough for me to know he has a gruff voice and a gruff attitude. But he intrigues me with his regular purchase of the New Scientist magazine. I bite the bullet and ask him if he’s a scientist. He laughs and says, ‘Do I look like a scientist?’

‘Scientists come in all shapes and sizes.’

‘I just like to keep my brain active—that’s why I read it. My work is boring manual labour.’

I chat again with the young mum who only moved here from Poland five years ago with no English. She has the strongest Cockney accent I’ve ever heard from someone who didn’t grow up in London.

Human behaviour in the supermarket demonstrates that even the friendliest customer is never really your ally and they can turn on you in a heartbeat. An amiable, elegant and chatty older woman with a deceptively uncanny resemblance to Denise Richardson, the Agony Aunt on This Morning, has a complete change of personality when she asks me about discount petrol vouchers. I indicate that I’m not sure if we are giving them out. She asks me tersely, ‘Well, do you know or don’t you?’

I have my four-week assessment today. Susie brings over the paperwork and starts to give me feedback.

‘You’re doing really well, really engaging with customers, but I’ve noticed you lack confidence.’

‘Oh really?’ I don’t like the sound of this. ‘How so?’

‘You just seem nervous, like you’re not confident with customers.’ I know she’s not aware of the recent incidents so she must mean my general interaction with them.

‘Really? I find talking to the customers a doddle. The only time you could call me nervous is over the technical things. But talking to customers, that’s the easiest part of the job.’

‘There’s just something in your manner.’

The assessment is good, though. I get a green, which means that the girl done good. Three reds and you’re in trouble, so for now, I’m safe. I add a toadying note on my assessment saying I will try to be more confident. Susie lets me skim-read the paperwork before asking me to sign it. She then fiddles around with it. It seems to me that we are often asked to sign things first with management adding their own notes afterwards.

Then, out of the blue, a supervisor shouts out that, thanks to Jenny we’ve just got a 100 per cent MCM. I’m not sure what that means exactly, but everyone gives a round of applause.

Michelle is prying again and enquires about my assessment; I play it down. She’s finding it hard to get uninterested customers to engage with her. I tell her the trick is to persevere. I know that she’s not the only one who finds it difficult; from my till I can often see other checkout girls just silently doing their job. Even Rebecca, who has such a natural magnetic charm, tells me she struggles.

I bump into Katherine at the end of my shift and she wants to talk about the difficult customers I encountered the day before. ‘They were so nasty, I felt for you. Some customers just think we are machines and have no life beyond this place.’

Clare, who is slumped in a chair in the corner of the locker room, lifts her head long enough to say sagely, ‘In through one ear, out the other.’

Saturday, 6 December 2008

I read today that Tesco’s shoppers are dropping it for Morrisons and Asda. Tesco is still doing OK, but the question being asked now is—is the store losing momentum?

After the week I’ve had, I’ve lost all momentum. But I brave it and am, thankfully, rewarded with a trolley till. My first customer is an enormous woman with five obese kids and all she buys are five jumbo packets of crisps—that’s about a hundred packets of crisps in total. She yells at her kids and they yell at her. It’s a joy to behold.

In fairness, a simple shopping trip reduces the best of families to a dysfunctional version of their normal selves. I’m no longer embarrassed by the number of arguments I’ve witnessed between two unsuspecting adults unaware of the entertainment they’ve provided for the bored checkout girl before them. And the rows are always over small and ultimately insignificant things: plans for the evening, the choice of dinner for the night, Sunday lunch with the family, the cost of the shop they’ve just completed, the things they forgot to buy. I read a study that found that couples who shop together for more than seventy minutes will almost always start to row. Seventy-one-plus minutes in a supermarket and they’re ready to sign the divorce papers. And when my customers are not squabbling they’re just being odd. Some of them plan where they place their groceries on the conveyor belt with military precision, with the intention of ensuring it will be convenient to unpack when they get home. One man today asks me to wait while he spends ten minutes carefully unloading his shop on to the belt. He groups all like items together. As I ring through the items I can see the layout of his kitchen. First the larder with pasta, tinned tuna, baked beans, biscuits and pickles, then the fridge with cheeses, milk, meat and prepared salad. Next, the kitchen cupboard holding the bleach, washing-up liquid, scouring pads, washing powder, fabric conditioner and kitchen towels. It’s weirdly inspiring.

I spend much of my shift looking out for Richard, but, as expected, I don’t see him. After clocking off I hunt him down. He’s in the canteen with the usual posse of pit bulls and I ask for a private word. He takes me to a quiet office and we have a quick chat about my progress so far. Richard is one of a rare breed these days; a touchy-feely manager. I know my request for changing my shift is pushing the limits of new Cog protocol, but I have no option. I explain my childcare problem and he reminds me I had accepted the hours offered, but then promises to look into it. Finally he says:

‘We will support you anyway we can—put it in writing, suggest your alternatives, be as accommodating as possible, and Personnel and I will look at it and see what we can do.’ His response is heartening; he tells me not to worry and that we will sort something out. He is head and shoulders above all the managers I have had over the years. And I’ll bet my last bit of spare change that he’s the reason so many checkout girls have stuck it out here for so long. He’s considerate, courteous and proof that you don’t have to be bad to be good.

I go to Rebecca’s till for a quick chat before I leave for the day. The customer Rebecca is serving wants to do a split payment and Rebecca asks me how. Before I can help, the customer jumps in; she’s a former Tesco employee. She tells us she was there four years ago, earning £7.50 an hour at the age of sixteen. Rebecca is outraged and asks, not for the first time, ‘What am I doing here?’

Before I leave for the day I see a notice in the staff toilet called ‘Talkback’. It reads: ‘There is a popular misconception that Tesco pay more than we do. It’s not true. We also pay for fifteen-minute tea breaks, Tesco don’t.’

Saturday, 13 December 2008

Two weeks to go till Christmas. I go in today after the worst bout of flu I’ve suffered in years. I’m shaky, dizzy and can barely breathe. My chest is congested, but I am too much of a coward to call the absentee line again. I called in sick yesterday and it didn’t go down well. The manager at the end of the line interrogated me and left me with the distinct feeling that he didn’t really believe I was ill. So today I go in.

I see Michelle as soon as I walk through the doors. She tells me that when she had to call in sick she was reminded, in no uncertain terms, that she was still on probation.

‘But when you’re sick, you’re sick. You’re only going to contaminate others.’

‘And it’s not as if you get paid sick leave here, is it?’ she adds.

I take my painkillers, put my head down and get on with the job. I can’t think straight so struggle to talk to customers. I opt for cursory greetings, ask about plastic bags and Nectar cards, and send them on their way. Nevertheless, I do end up chatting to another Cog. She tells me she works thirty-nine hours a week at the store plus an extra eleven hours cleaning. ‘I’ve got to pay the bills somehow.’ She’s only just started at Sainsbury’s after finding it impossible to meet her growing monthly expenses.

That’s not a problem for the numerous ladies who come to my till with their designer bags. Today I count seven luxury-end bags. But designer bag or no designer bag, everyone loves a bargain. One of these upmarket ladies tells me she queued up to shop at Woolworths’ closing-down sale and picked up some knocked-down bed sheets.

Christmas gift shopping has started at the store and Mamma Mia! is in virtually every woman’s trolley, so I share with them the one nerd fact I’ve picked up recently: it’s the fastest-selling UK DVD of all time. According to Justin King’s latest newsletter, Sainsbury’s alone sold 200,000 copies in its first week.

He also reminds us of the importance of ensuring availability of stock, delivering great customer service and doing our job well in the build-up to Christmas. He also says the new ads with Ant and Dec and Jamie have gone down a storm.

Just before the end of my shift, I’m asked to close my till early. I’m taken aside and told that I was being assessed today. My heart skips a few beats, but somehow I get a green despite my minimal customer interaction. Ayesha reminds me that the mystery customer is most likely to come in on a Friday and Saturday so I’ve got to be on the ball. I point the finger at my ill health and add creepily, ‘I really do love talking to customers.’ Ayesha and Susie make sympathetic noises, but they’re not convinced. In a shameless attempt to save my skin I ask them to reassess me soon.

I hand in my letter for Richard and wonder if this impromptu assessment has anything to do with my request to change my hours. Then I head to Rebecca’s till for a quick end-of-shift gossip session.

‘I’ve been waiting for one assessment and you’ve already had two.’

‘That’s probably because you’re so kick-arse at this they don’t need to test you.’

‘Far from it, it’s the most unnatural thing in the world for me. I just don’t believe that they want to talk to us.’ She looks at the middle-aged man she’s serving and asks me to dare her to ask him what he thinks about our customer service policy.

‘Excuse me, sir, can I ask you something? Would you like me to engage with you?’

‘Pardon?’ He says looking baffled.

‘Would you like me to talk to you, ask you how you are?’

‘Well, if you want to, but I’m not that bothered. Why?’

‘We’re told to, and I wasn’t sure if customers want that from us.’

‘Well, I always find it odd when you lot ask how we are and when we ask you back you get caught off guard. Or when you offer help with packing and we say yes—you look put out. It shows it’s just superficial.’

‘But is it nice when we do it? Does it leave a good impression?’

‘Sometimes I just want to get out of here as fast as possible. And to be honest, I’m usually in a bit of a coma when I’m shopping. So chat to me, don’t chat to me—I’m not bothered.’

Wednesday, 17 December 2008

I miss the place so much this week I go to my local Sainsbury’s on a day off. My shop comes to almost £90. And I react in exactly the same way as my customers: shock, horror, ‘really??’ Followed by frantic bill-checking afterwards. As a result, I resolve to live a little and pop into Morrisons. I buy a packet of frozen peas, frozen vegetables, pizza bases, bread and milk and it comes to just under £7. That is cheaper. I need to stake this place out, hunt down items on my regular shopping list, get to know the store despite there being no obvious attraction. If I could, aged fifteen, go out with the sweaty boy with pimples and over-sized glasses, I can do this. OK, so that relationship only lasted for a third of an hour, but it was good to step into my discomfort zone. And if it saves some pennies, I’m up for the challenge. Customer service here really sucks, though. The checkout girl barely looks up. No matter, in these times I’d rather save some pennies than get a pleasant smile.

The Sunday Times has run an exposé on workers’ rights at Amazon. Endless shifts, long weeks and terrible pay. They get £6.30 an hour, which is the same as Sainsbury’s. But the big complaint is about those who are punished for being ill; taking a day off sick results in one penalty point. A worker with six points faces dismissal. Thank goodness I don’t work there.

Thursday, 18 December 2008

The first hour today is really quiet. A few people come through the tills, but most of the time I’m just twiddling my thumbs. I read Justin’s newsletter and he says that Woolworth’s demise has had a knock-on effect because Entertainment UK—who supply Sainsbury’s with DVDs, CDs, games and books—is part of the Woolies chain. He talks of stock supply challenges, but states they are now working with three new suppliers. His outlook is eternally upbeat and it’s obvious to see why. Sainsbury’s prospects look bright, they’ve cornered their market fairly well and may yet ride out the hard times ahead.

But while the view from the top down is looking good, at the bottom where the wheels of the supermarket turn silently I’ve noticed a quiet indifference. Most of the newsletters sit unread and the internal magazine is usually only thumbed by me—my colleagues clock in, do their duties and clock out—and my questions about the future of the supermarket and its success are met with lethargic shrugs or bemused stares. ‘It’s just a job,’ I get told.

During a quiet period I get sent to the bakery. Sarita, a young Asian checkout girl, shows me the ropes. She turns out to be a great source of gossip, although I notice some bitterness in her tone compounded by the fact that she never smiles. As we get our hats and aprons on she tells me that two Cogs have been sacked this week—one of them for stealing. It is the stupidest thing to do because there are cameras right above the tills.

As Sarita talks, it becomes clear that she hates being on tills. ‘The supervisors have got their favourites and there is a lot of backstabbing—you’ll find out.’ She says that the customers are ‘horrid’ and the more she talks about them, the clearer it becomes that she actually hates them. Her advice to me is ‘just keep your head down and don’t get involved…everybody finds out everyone’s business and then interferes. I got some training at the cigarette kiosk and I told one person—by the time I went down everyone knew.’

She says all of this with little prompting or interruption from me. I’m starting to feel rather perturbed by the picture she paints of this place, until it transpires that she’s going through a hard time right now because she has just broken up with her boyfriend who works in the store and is the son of one of the supervisors.

‘I let business and pleasure come too close together and now I’m paying the price.’

I spend the next thirty minutes packing cookies and noting that the place is a mess. I find myself putting cookies into paper bags and leaving traces of chocolate behind on all the packs I touch. It’s not unhygienic, but the packs look really grubby by the time I’m done with them. For the next two hours I seal buns, baps and hot-dog rolls under the supervision of Sarita, only to find an hour later that I’m sealing them in packaging that is not sufficiently airtight to prevent them from going stale, so I redo them all.

I meet Marcus, a third-year Business Studies student Cog. We start chatting and he tells me he doesn’t know what he’s going to do once he graduates. He’s going to stick with this until he figures it out and ‘rides out the recession’.

I’m sure I hear my name called but Sarita assures me it’s someone else. Later she rushes to get me and says the supervisors are furious because they’ve put out three calls for me. I race to the tills. ‘I couldn’t hear you because the music in the bakery is blasting,’ I tell Susie while trying to catch my breath. She smiles, not looking remotely convinced.

The first lady through my till is a lady in her late sixties. She complains about her no-good thirty-something son. ‘He’s trained as a graphic designer but has been out of work for eight years. He’s lazy, doesn’t help around the house and I’m his financial crutch. And now we’ve got this recession and I’m more stressed than ever. He’s doing some charity work and he reckons that’s doing enough. But where’s the money going to come from?’

It strikes me that at her age she shouldn’t have to worry about taking care of a grown man. Despite her own woes, she’s shopping for her ninety-nine-year-old neighbour who is house-bound and virtually bed-bound. ‘She’s ready to go,’ she says to me meaningfully.

An architect comes through my till and tells me that work is still madly busy. ‘Credit crunch or no credit crunch, it’s just not quiet now, not even with Christmas. If the recession is going to take effect, we’ll be the first to be affected. But hey, so far so good. So let’s see.’

A man in his thirties tells me he’s decided to rent out his home because he can’t afford the mortgage; he’s found a place to rent nearby instead. With rent rates sky high at the moment, the rental income he’s getting is covering the mortgage on the house he owns and some of the rent on the place he’s staying in.

The rest of the afternoon passes without event. Thursday is often a staring-vacantly-into-mid-air day. When I look across at the other Cogs, I see them all doing the same.

Friday, 19 December 2008

For the first time in six weeks someone comes through my checkout and, when I tell them the total is £72.97, they actually say, ‘That’s not too bad.’ Her entire shop is from the Sainsbury’s Basics range.

Everyone is starting to ask about their reward points. I redeem as little as £2.50 up to a staggering £130 for one couple who have been collecting their points all year. Now the yuletide spending has begun and the Christmas gift shopping is well under way—they’re all buying beauty gift packs by the dozen: soaps, creams, bath oils. It’s the thought that counts, but if you ask me, it looks like a pretty thoughtless gift. And just as I’m wondering what constitutes a deep and meaningful gift, a woman comes over and piles packets of cake cups, cake mixture, marshmallows, smarties and cake icing on to the belt.

‘Are you having a party?’ I ask.

‘Oh no—this lot are my Christmas gifts. I do food hampers.’

‘That’s a great idea!’ I exclaim.

‘I’m making cakes, biscuits, pasta, chicken soup—I’ll spend two days cooking, and then I’m done.’

The whole thing costs her £85—and there are gifts there for about twenty people. Now that’s a creative credit-crunching Christmas.

Another lady tells me she’s dishing out cash for Christmas. ‘There’s no thought in it and it takes the pleasure out of giving, but at least they can get what they want.’

A teenager and his mother discuss their Christmas plans with me; Mum’s looking forward to a couple of weeks off work with her family. ‘If only, though, I could get the kids away from their computer games.’

‘Tell me about it,’ says the lady behind her. ‘The Xboxes, Nintendos, Wiis—so much for spending time together at Christmas.’ In both sets of shopping trolleys they have, you guessed it, computer games.

More couples arguing today. And no one cares that I’m watching. One man storms off, receipt in hand, furious at the amount his wife has spent. I watch her follow him, red-faced, pushing the huge trolley and dragging her toddlers behind her.

Richard runs from till to till saying he wants to see us all get into the Christmas spirit from tomorrow.

‘I want to see tinsel, lots of tinsel. I want to see reindeer hairbands, Santa Claus, the lot.’

Saturday, 20 December 2008

I’m in the locker room loos tying my hair back with a piece of tinsel when Michelle walks in.

‘Are you doing any overtime next week?’ she asks.

‘No, I’m not. It’s too difficult with my kids. Are you?’

‘Same here—I just can’t. My daughters were ill last week so I had to call in sick. You know, I’m finding it really difficult with them—I just don’t know what to do. I really need to change my shifts from three to two.’

‘Why don’t you talk to Richard? Just tell him how tough it is.’

‘I know I should, I should…but…we’re still on probation, you know.’

She is obsessed with our probation. I want to tell her I’ve asked for a shift change but don’t.

‘If my situation doesn’t change, I might have to leave—you know,’ she says rubbing her eyes wearily.

Suddenly we realise that there is someone else in the toilets. So she changes her tune.

‘Well, maybe I won’t have to leave…I’ll see you downstairs.’ And she runs off.

This is my last shift before Christmas. I turn the corner towards the tills and walk on to a pantomime set. There are elves, female Father Christmases, two-legged reindeers, walking Christmas gifts…One of the supervisors is parcelled up inside a box wrapped with ribbon. Richard is dressed in a Santa Claus outfit with an enormous white beard. The others have all gone with a Sexy Santa theme: short skirts trimmed with tinsel, tight black belts pulled suggestively around the waist, red corsets lined with white fake fur, stockings, tails, reindeer hairbands—it is a Santa’s harem.

The local scouts are in, helping with packing (and raising money for charity) and I’ve got a garrulous Scout leader at my tills. She ends up talking to all my customers so I just listen.

Everyone wants to know about our Christmas hours and I tell them we’re open twenty-four hours a day next week. They must all be planning to come in then, because it’s certainly quieter today than I expected.

There are lots of unfamiliar faces around and I realise that they’re the extra staff taken on for Christmas. Others in the retail sector are cutting back on part-time staff and offering extra hours, but not so at Sainsbury’s, and there’s been no talk here of redundancies.

At the end of my shift, Richard calls me into his office. He gives me a Christmas card, thanks me for my work and offers me a Quality Street. He asks about my childcare situation, tells me he will consider it in light of the recent sackings, and give me an answer in the New Year. He then talks to me about being off sick. He asks me to go through what was wrong, how I informed them, and reminds me that I don’t get paid sick leave. He takes out a piece of paper and draws up a six-point list for every instance of sick leave:

1. Fill out a back-to-work form. And talk through what happens next.

2. Have a chat about why sick. Can Sainsbury’s do anything to support you?

3. Verbal warning.

4. Written warning.

5. Disciplinary action.

6. Dismissal.

‘Wow!’ I find myself spluttering. ‘But most people are sick about three times a year. What about the fact that we might pass on what we’ve got?’

He tells me politely that once everyone learns about these six stages, no one goes beyond the second or third. This, it seems, is Richard’s way of pulling us into line.

When I emerge, Michelle is next in the queue. She looks anxious and asks me what it’s about. I reassure her it’s a Christmas greeting and she relaxes. She comes to my till ten minutes later looking brow-beaten.

‘I asked him if I could change my shifts and he said no.’

‘Really? He’s not even going to consider it?’

‘No. He said someone has already asked him, so it’s too late for me.’ Her soft blue eyes are piercing when they stare.

I say nothing and I’m not sure why. As she walks away I feel uncomfortable. I know that the supermarket has already invested £2000 in training us, I’ve done OK in my assessments and I’m not scared of negotiating. Michelle is scared witless about losing her job, paranoid about our probationary period and doesn’t know how to play the game. It shouldn’t be my problem, yet I’m racked with guilt.

Tuesday, 23 December 2008

Today I go to my local Sainsbury’s to get my Christmas shopping at 9 p.m. and I’m seething because they’ve run out of rosemary. I peruse the other shelves and note that many are short of stock. What’s the point of being open twenty-four hours if the shelves are empty?

The newspapers are full to the brim with Christmas cheer; there’s no escape from recession stories, but I’ve not yet seen it translate on the shop floor. I am now becoming more certain that supermarkets will survive this recession. I read that nine out of ten retailers are already discounting—Sainsbury’s is one of them. Since I’ve been here, there has been a sell-out halfprice sale on toys, 25 per cent off on clothes and equally large discounts on booze.

Saturday, 27 December 2008

I get in early to do some shopping and as soon as I walk in I’m distracted by yet another half-price sale in the clothing department. I find myself rummaging through racks of clothes I definitely do not need. Sainsbury’s TU range is really a huge success story. It’s the reason the supermarket has broken into the top ten of the UK’s biggest clothing retailers, thanks to the number of shoppers, including myself, who combine their food shop with some retail therapy. According to a report in the Times supermarkets’ clothing ranges make up nearly a quarter of items of clothing sold in the UK. Asda has 10.3 per cent of the market, Primark 9.9 per cent, Tesco 9 per cent and Sainsbury’s, new to clothing, has 2.3 per cent of the market by volume. The reason for their success is that they focus on cheaper basic items of clothing. I know this myself, having picked up a £9 cardigan, £18 jeans and £4 indoor boots in recent weeks. I also read in the report that Sainsbury’s TU range is believed to have increased by 40 per cent in the last year, making an estimated £300 million in sales. The report says that its top performer is thought to be lingerie, and I can certainly vouch for this judging by the number of bras and knickers that come down my till several times a day alongside the tinned tomatoes and kitchen foil.

I take a peek at the newspapers at the kiosk and all the front pages are reporting the record-breaking Boxing Day sales. People have been queuing around the block from the early hours and there have been stampedes around the country. On an inside page there’s an editorial reporting that, despite the Boxing Day boom, the New Year is going to bring spending cuts, job insecurity and a long recession. It claims that people have started planning cutbacks and aiming to live more cheaply, although I have yet to see it.

The high-octane sales atmosphere is making some shoppers tense. My first customer today grumbles at me about the intense traffic in the retail park nearby—people are trying to get to Comet, Argos and Homebase. ‘What’s wrong with them? They’ve all gone Comet mad.’ The couple behind him tell me they went to the big shopping centre for the sales but when they saw people arguing in the car park they turned around and drove here instead. Then a middle-aged couple tell me they queued up from 5 a.m. outside Next and are pleased that, while they spent £300, they saved £300 in discounts. He doesn’t let the fact that he had to spend £300 to save £300 bother him. But when I ask if he’s worried about the recession, a different story emerges. He works for BT broadband.

‘There’s no such thing as a job for life there any more. They’re making redundancies across the board, but I think for the moment my job is safe. Who knows for how long, though?’

Another customer, a mum with a three-year-old, has spent £200 on clothes in Oasis, Principles and Next. ‘I’m not letting myself think about the recession today—ask me in a few days.’ She pauses. ‘But when you’ve got kids, life is so difficult that you need to spoil yourself, don’t you?’

‘And spending makes you feel good, even if it’s a temporary high,’ I add. She nods, but I see a small frown starting to develop across her forehead.

Most people I ask haven’t been to the sales yet. They’re all saying they just can’t face the shops at the moment. One woman in her thirties has the recession very much on her mind. She says she has decided against any sales shopping ‘because everyone has got to tighten their belts for the rough ride ahead. Things being as they are, I’m just grateful to have a job.’

I eavesdrop on two middle-aged ladies talking. One is chastising the other for dragging her into Sainsbury’s. ‘It’s only been two days and here we are shopping again, it’s sickening.’

When I ask people about their New Year plans, the vast majority say they are going to celebrate at home quietly, while one or two are having small soirées, saying, ‘It’s cheaper than going out.’

For the New Year penny-pinchers, paying in cash is truly the only way to control spending. Studies have long shown that it’s much more painful than swiping a card, and stimulates a region in the brain linked with discomfort which is anaesthetised by credit cards. And that’s exactly what one customer is thinking. She plonks her shopping on my belt and announces, ‘No more than £21.’ When it gets to £20.33, she ruthlessly takes something off the belt and pays in cash, and I crown her queen of thrift.

One man shopping with his six-year-old twins has crackers, a chicken roast, root vegetables, wrapping paper and bottles of wine in his shop.

‘Are you celebrating Christmas late?’ I blurt out before I can stop myself.

‘Tomorrow—seems a good way to save money.’ The crackers are the Different by Design range and absolutely stunning—he’s picked them up for a bargain £6.

I hear one of my first bona fide redundancy stories today. A customer tells me her daughter was made redundant two months ago and now can’t find a job.

‘She used to be a secretary at a big estate agent’s in town and she’s been hunting high and low but there is just no work to be found. She’s started looking in retail now and, fingers crossed, she’s in the running for a secretarial job at Tesco.’

At last I’m someone’s favourite checkout girl. A lively, colourful family I’ve served a few times have started to seek me out. I see them standing by the checkouts scanning the tills—and when I wave at them, they hurry over with big smiles. I’ve finally made it.

‘I was looking for you,’ says Mum. ‘I was terrified you’d been sacked after we were chatting to you, and the man behind us was so angry.’

‘He was fine, don’t worry. We certainly don’t get into trouble for talking to customers here.’

Her thirty-something son joins them with some extra groceries in his arms. We hold our usual spelling bee competition and he teases me for misspelling a word a few weeks ago. I love this family. There are two generations of them shopping together and Dad, the patriarch, always pays, although not before grunting loudly about the price of food shopping.

There is a big fracas at the front of the store and it transpires that the lottery machine has crashed. Unsurprisingly, there are a lot of angry customers complaining about it around the store. I find myself apologising on behalf of Sainsbury’s and feeling like a moron when I’m told, ‘Well, it’s not YOUR fault, is it?’

Before I leave to go home I pick up my discounted kettle and go to Rebecca’s till. She tells me that the person sacked for dipping into the tills is Bill, the young man I heard bragging about his collection of shining stars a few weeks ago. It’s raised the level of suspicion amongst management, she says. During a meeting with Richard she witnessed one of the other managers showing Richard a receipt where the checkout girl had reduced something from £25 to 25p and said he suspected ‘she’s up to something’. ‘I get the feeling that the eye of suspicion here is really strong and we all come under detailed surveillance.’

On my way out I hear one of the Cogs talking about her shifts in the last two or three days before Christmas. ‘There were queues all the way down the aisles, every single checkout was heaving. Unbelievable…If I hadn’t been here, I wouldn’t have believed it.’

The radio goes on as I drive home and the lottery crash is making the news. It wasn’t just a local event; computer terminals crashed in shops around the country leaving thousands unable to buy tickets. It’s been reported like a national disaster. The only other news is the sales frenzy; half-price cuts, 75 per cent and even an unprecedented 90 per cent off sales. It’s an insane scramble to beat the credit crunch. People have been queuing since dawn to get into some shops and there have been fights breaking out over handbags. After the news I listen to a programme about how to save money on food shopping during the recession by cooking more, making a shopping list and paying in cash.

Saturday, 3 January 2009

The New Year starts with grim news for the retail world—shop closures. There are more Woolies shutting up shop and now it’s Adams kids wear. I think the winners in all of this will be the supermarkets—they already provide the Woolies style bric-a-brac and low-cost children’s clothes. Rumours are circulating that Sainsbury’s may buy the Adams brand. One insolvency specialist has predicted the collapse of between 10 and 15 national retail chains by mid-January. Others are saying that at least 15-20 retailers are extremely weak financially and that one shop in ten will close in the coming months.

I’m in the locker room, squeezing my over-sized bag into my tiny locker when Michelle walks in. She’s a bit cool and barely says hello before heading down for her shift. I’m puzzled—I hope everything’s OK with her girls. Before I get on to my till I have a quick chat with a twenty-year-old student called Nick. I overheard him being reprimanded by a till captain a few weeks ago about a break issue. He tells me he’s been here a year—and he isn’t happy. He needs time off around his exams and this is proving difficult because he needs a job to get him through college. ‘If I don’t have a job after I finish college this place will be to blame.’

I talk to a man in his fifties who works as an eye consultant at a hospital. He tells me that jobs are being cut in the NHS and he shrugs his shoulders wearily, telling me he’s not sure that even his own job is safe. A checkout girl from M&S comes to my till telling me she never shops at M&S because it’s too expensive. She hasn’t noticed it getting quieter, although she’s well aware that the store isn’t doing too well. She has her bags for re-use with her, saying it’s a habit she’s had to learn after watching customers reluctantly cough up for bags. I’m turning into a bag obsessive myself. The supermarket insists we ask customers at the start of their shop if they are re-using their bags—the red prompt on my screen pops up before every transaction. And that’s where it starts to go wrong.

‘Do you have your own bags or do you need ours?’ I always ask, leaning down below the till in preparation to tear off some.

‘I’ve got my own, thanks.’ And then about a dozen or so emerge. For every bag a customer brings back they get a Nectar point. This is the main motivation for most customers.

‘How many do you have there?’

‘I don’t know how many I’m going to use yet, do I?’ comes the gruff reply.

So I ask them to tell me at the end. And then they (and I) usually forget. One customer this happens with asks me after I hand over her receipt whether I put her bag points on. She is hopping mad that I haven’t. I apologise but I had asked her to tell me how many she used. She looks at my name badge and storms off.

Right behind her are three generations of women from one family. This is something I see a lot, and today I comment on how sweet it is to witness. We laugh about how a simple supermarket shop can push mother-daughter friction to boiling point.

While many are up for a quick chuckle at the checkout, others use me like a drop-in therapy service. A pretty thirty-something blonde tells me the story of her life-long struggle to control her diabetes. It transpires that her sweet tooth gets in the way. I ogle the cakes, chocolate bars and bags of sweets she’s purchasing.

‘I comfort-eat because things at home haven’t always been great, you know?’ she says with a sad smile. ‘So every time I felt down or tired or stressed I’d just have a piece of cake and I’d feel better. Before I knew it, I went from being quite slim, to quite fat.’

‘You’re not fat,’ I say quickly.

‘You’re sweet, but I am.’

I’m desperate to take the goodies off the belt, but I’m neither her doctor nor her friend, so I wish her ‘Happy New Year’ and watch forlornly as she walks away.

One man in his late twenties is getting the weekly shop while his wife is at home tending to his three-year-old, two-year-old and one-year-old. I’m in awe. He tells me with three under-fours the couple no longer have any time for each other and it’s affecting their marriage.

‘It’s all our own fault, because we weren’t careful enough. She has these really heavy periods and so she has to take these injections to control her menstrual cycle because she bleeds too much…’

OK, that is far too much information.

‘And what happened was that she was on the pill but I reckon that either the injections were cancelling out the pill or she just forgot to take it and then when we fancied a bit of the ol’ Posh ’n’ Becks, that was it—wham bam…’

By now I’m far exceeding my items per minute.

‘The thing is that the doctor told us that, with every kid you have, you get more fertile, so the riskiest time to do it is straight after you have your last one. I mean, obviously all that breast-feeding stuff gets in the way, but I’m a man, aren’t I. I got my needs.’

He grins and I feel quite queasy. I’m no prude but there is a time and place.

After my shift I see Michelle three times: once at the checkouts, then in the locker room, and then when we do our usual end-of-shift shop—each time she gives me the cold shoulder. On the final occasion I grin and wink at her as we walk past each other, shopping baskets in tow. She barely makes any eye contact and grunts, ‘I can’t wait to get out of here.’

I head with my basket to Rebecca’s till for her take.

‘Do you think it’s me?’

‘Don’t be silly, why would it be you?’

‘I don’t know, she’s usually really friendly.’

‘Maybe she’s having a bad day.’

‘Or maybe she’s found out I’m the person who has bumped her request for a shift change?’

‘But it hasn’t been offered, has it?’

‘No, but so what?’

‘Well, she’d be silly to be annoyed already—he’s only considering it. You’re being paranoid.’

And with that she changes the subject.

‘Look I’ve got my own problems. I haven’t been assessed yet. Do you think it’s because they already know I’m rubbish?’

‘Well, that’s pretty obvious,’ I tease her. ‘It could be all that not-looking-at-the-customer stuff you do. It kinda gives the game away. Is your screen tuned into satellite TV or something, because every time I walk past you’re just staring at it?’

She chuckles. ‘No, I’m just staring at the time. It’s called clock-watching.’

Hooking up with Rebecca before I leave is the highlight of both our shifts. She’s anxious I’m going to leave if I don’t get my shift-change request approved. She’s right, I may have to.

When I get home I read a newspaper article about a forty-year-old woman who was asked for ID when buying alcohol in Tesco. She berates both the checkout girl and Tesco’s alcohol sales policy. The article is one-sided and I’m incensed. I’m desperate to write in and report the insidious way in which customers handle any request for ID. She may have been forty but judging by her photo (which I stare at for a while) yes, I may well have asked her for ID too.

Sunday, 4 January 2009

There’s a picture in the paper of Gordon Brown’s online shopping arriving in the very plastic bags he has pledged to scrap. He wants to wipe out the ten billion plastic bags given out each year and has ordered supermarkets to cut the number they give out by 50 per cent by this May. I think that’s an over-ambitious target. An overwhelming majority of people are still coming to the tills asking for bags even though we keep them out of sight. Some ask for them as if they have no idea that landfills are full of an endless number of non-biodegradable bags. Others, usually the elderly, bring their ones back without fail. But most people seem to leave them in the car.

Thursday, 8 January 2009

As news of Next’s and Debenhams’ drop in sales hit the headlines, the Boxing Day sales flurry is fast becoming a fading memory. But it’s not all doom and gloom; John Lewis has bucked the credit crunch curse and New Look has had a pretty robust performance over the festive period. My shift begins with news of Sainsbury’s Christmas sales making the headlines. The shop has beaten the national trend of retail gloom and enjoyed its ‘best ever Christmas performance’. Richard’s updated newsletter reports that ‘sales have shot through the roof’ over Christmas and that we all ‘provided excellent service at the checkouts, especially those who got into the Christmas spirit’.

It’s the astute Basics range that may pull the supersonic supermarket through this recession. Basics has seen a sales rise from 40 per cent a year ago. I’m certainly seeing it at the till as customers come to me, their trolleys laden with an entire shop from this range. An analyst quoted in the news says, ‘Sainsbury’s appears to be gauging the mood of UK consumers extremely well…It’s capitalising on its perceived offering of quality products, combining aggressive pricing promotions in the hope of capturing consumers’ desires to “feel good” in the face of an economic downturn while reducing expenditure.’ But he had a bleak warning too; with a vulnerable UK economy, the store was left more exposed than Tesco, which has an international portfolio.

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