By James Terminiello
The village smithy, the iceman, the hat blocker, the TV repair guy. All are now distant memories confined to dusty places like encyclopedias and dictionaries. Oh wait! They’re gone too. Well, anyway, to the roll call of extinct occupations, we will soon be adding cashiers. And I, for one, will miss them.
As you have surely noticed, checkouts at big-box stores today are nearly all self-service — save for one cashier/counselor who looms furtively in the shadows and only appears in corporeal form when you encounter a bar -ode dilemma. As retail shopping becomes more of a lonely experience – even the shelf stockers now spring spontaneously from pumpkins at the stroke of midnight — we will have no one to talk with except the disembodied voice of our mobile device.
It will only get worse. Imagine this:
At the fast-food drive-up window, you speak in your order. Instantly, eerie robotic hands furiously flip burgers, sink french fries, and froth quasi-milkshakes like some scene from a 1940s Warner Brothers cartoon. A request for extra onions causes a 1.3 second glitch for which you will have to pay because you did not order the standard meal. Then, as if to salve your desire for human contact, a smiling 3-D projection floating in a cloud of plasma — the image likely to be female, in her 20s, and of a nondescript or composite ethnic origin — hovers behind the counter as the completed meal emerges from a drawer below.
To set the seal on your loneliness, the robot scans your card while it is still in your wallet, thanks you by name, and reminds you that the new double crypto-cheese; onion, jalapeno, and Vegemite; vitamin-infused; near-meat; diet burger meal arrives next Thursday. And, by the way: Happy Birthday! You then go howling into the night.
That 3-D projection, however smiling and enticing, cannot hold a candle to a living and breathing cashier. Here is what is being lost forever:
At one time, your face-to-face with a cashier was your conduit to the straight poop on what’s going on in the store. The mispriced items. The unexpected sell-outs. The clear bait-and-switch scams that management was trying to pull. When that item will really be back in stock. And just what happened between the manager and that crazy customer last week. All good stuff.
Then there were the cashier fashion trends. As a group, cashiers used to lead the league, year in and year out, in strange and exotic finger nails adorned with parrots, diamonds, spider webs and mermaids, to name a few. Despite the extraordinary lengths of these miniature diving boards, these cashiers somehow displayed amazing dexterity in tapping accurately on the keyboard. And, like spoon balancing and plate spinning, this will soon be an art lost in the murky recesses of time.
In addition, there was the cashier’s remarkable ability to carry on binary conversations with you and the neighboring cashier, as follows:
To you: Paper or plastic?
To other cashier: So I was talking to Cheryl last night.
To you: How many rolls in the bag?
To other cashier: She thinks Fred is steady, but I know better.
To you: The milk is leaking. Wanna get another?
To other cashier: Two nights ago, when Cheryl called in sick, I saw Fred…
The spellbinding tales of the Cheryls and Freds of the world kept you on your toes. If you glazed over for a moment, you might not remember if you’re Cheryl, Fred, or just some tired customer sadly eyeing the exit on a rainy nigh t— and all could be lost.
As a byproduct of what we can now refer to as The Cashier Age, you had the opportunity while waiting in line to flip through without purchasing some of those scandal-mongering newspapers. You could count on finding this one’s dark past, that one’s unexpected baby eruption, and just who is entering their “sad, final days.” And, so sunset your days of being au courant with pop culture.
With a silent nod to technological progress, we must bid farewell to this unique life form who will never again scan our linguini. All I can ask is, who will step up and carry on the tradition of announcing on the loudspeaker: “Child vomit in aisle 9. Bring mop and bucket!”
James Terminiello, a marketing manager who works in New York City, writes from Mount Laurel Township.
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