Life Through the Eyes of a Cashier

By Emily Wasson on June 11, 2013

After a while, you start to get used to the constant beeping. You stop caring so much about how your nails look, you accept the fact that you will go on your date smelling like rotisserie chicken and olives, and you probably have more fruit and vegetable codes memorized than you know phone numbers off the top of your head.

But the worst is realizing that minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour, and that you spend your whole day on your feet only to have what feels like half your paycheck taken away from you by taxes.

And there are just some days that you feel like no matter how hard you try to be a pleaser, there are just some people in life that will never be happy.

You find that you are always lost in your own thoughts. Greet, scan, bag, farewell, repeat. Everything becomes one big blur, and you monotonously carry on your duties as you waste away inside your own brain. You start asking yourself deep, thought-provoking questions: “Am I happy?”; “Why am I not sleeping?”; “Is this really what I want to do with the rest of my life?” Then, the next thing you know you are zoning out and there is a carton of smashed eggs on the ground.

Ask any cashier and they could go on for hours complaining about the little things they experience on their shift. As cashiers, we see it all. We meet all types of people: happy, sad, cranky, loud, creepy, fashionable, tasteless people. There are people who will not acknowledge a hello and those who genuinely want to know how your day is going. When you are a cashier, you see people at their best and people at their worst. When you are a cashier, you see the truth in people.

We have approximately three to five minutes with every customer that comes through our lines. It amazes me how much you can learn about someone in such a short period of time. For some reason, when you are a cashier, people open up to you about their daily struggles, their worries, and their heartaches. There is a sigh of relief some people let out when they turn to leave. For a short time, you serve as an outlet for a mother who just cannot take her kids anymore, a husband that has just lost his wife to cancer, a father that cannot find a job, a grandmother who has just gained a grandson, a doctor who has just saved a life or a writer that has just published a book.

At the end of a long shift, you come to the realization that we are all human. It is human to get mad when the lines are too long and to be annoyed that we did not bag your groceries correctly. It is human to complain, to whine and to dread certain aspects of your life, whether it is work, home, school or the future.

It is OK to lose your temper every once in a while, you CAN dress like a slob every now and then, and you WILL cheat on your diet and eat your favorite candy bar sometimes because, quite honestly, there comes a time when you NEED a break from it all.

I often find myself telling customers that it is going to be ok. But over and over again, I find myself lost in my own head asking myself if I will be ok too. And then my thoughts get drowned out by the beeping, and I realize just how small my problems are in this giant world. If only more of us had the chance to experience life through the eyes of a cashier.

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