Bag It, Grocery Goofballs!

I try not to spend a lot of time reminiscing about the glory days. I really don't. If you do that much, you'll just turn into a grumpy old man. (Or even a grumpy young man).

Nevertheless, I've got to admit that I'm saddened by the sorry state of grocery-store service nowadays.

I'm an expert in the field, mind you. My first real job was as a grocery-store sacker, and I moved up to checker after about a year. Over the course of my entire three-year stint in the grocery industry, I occasionally filled other roles around the store -- from stocking milk to counting tills to washing produce to cleaning (yucch!) bathrooms. I even signed for a shipment of food once. About the only thing I didn't do was work as a butcher. (I can barely cut paper. They're not going to put me in charge of cutting meat).

The point is, when it comes to how a grocery store should operate, I know of what I speak. And it's not how they're doing things over at Here Everything's Better (and other places).

Don't get me wrong. I love the grocery store. It's a magical land of endless opportunity. But, nowadays, you have to deal with too many trolls and ogres -- leaving the end of your journey nearly impossible to envision.

First, let me address sacking. Or bagging, if that's your preferred nomenclature. Back in my day, we actually utilized two different kinds of bags -- paper or plastic, and the customer always was asked his or her preference. I understand we live in an eco-friendly world now and paper bags are out of touch, but here's the thing: When a sacker learns how to sack in a paper bag first, he learns the fundamentals of what I like to call "bag building."

There's an art to sacking. No kidding. I'm serious. It's kind of like building a house -- you start with a solid foundation, firm up the corners and then elevate as needed.

Now, back in the early 1990s, we still had dolts who'd put the can of pineapples on top of the eggs, or fold the bread up like a pretzel and stuff it into a tiny crack of bag space. But those idiots have now hatched their eggs and multiplied.

Plus, they've spawned a new modern idiot sacker who puts each of your individual 117 items into its own separate plastic bag. Talk about waste. Dude, don't you know you're working in an eco-friendly zone? Get with the program!

But guess what? The quality of work is no better a few paces up the aisle. Grocery-store checkers (or cashiers) are, generally, even worse than the sackers. At least compared to the good old days.

As I watch them do their things, I doubt that a one of them has ever attended Checker School. Oh yes, there is a Checker School. Or at least there was. And I have my masters from CSU, let me tell you.

In 1990 or so, when I moved from sacker to checker, I was required to attend a week's worth of Checker School in College Station, 45 miles from my home store in Brenham. We're talking eight hours a day of intensive checker training, with plenty of emphasis on speed and accuracy.

You'd better believe there were tests, too. The produce codes, my gosh, the produce codes! I had to learn a dictionary-sized book of them. Even today, some 17 years after I cashed my last Apple Tree paycheck, I can still tell you that the code for bananas was "350" and that red delicious apples were "380" and that bok choy was "131." It's a little frightening, to tell you the truth.

Today, the customer weighs his or her own produce, prints out a little UPC label, and then gets his bananas scanned along with everything else. God forbid the fruit doesn't scan, either. Because then, without fail, your friendly neighborhood checker will stop, crinkle her forehead in bewilderment and begin flipping through a nearby produce book to determine exactly what, pray tell, are these round orange things I'm holding?

I'm always concerned that the checker's brain is just going to start oozing out of their ears in those moments. Kind of like rotten banana goo.

But my biggest pet peeve of all is the speed -- or lack thereof -- at which the modern-day checker performs. For us, checking was a game, a race. We took pride in seeing many, many customers and getting them in and out as quickly as possible.

We actually charted our speed. Every checker at every Apple Tree in Texas did. You'd compete to see how many SPM (Scans Per Minute) you could achieve. Each month, a report arrived listing the top 100 or so checkers at all the Apple Trees, and I made the cut a handful of times.

I probably wouldn't rank it among my top 100 lifetime achievements, but it was still a pretty cool moment to see your name on that list. A current coworker in the sports department who has heard tales of my grocery-store exploits before always jokes that I was an "all-state checker."

When a checker got in a true rhythm, it was a beautiful sight. At the time, our cash registers talked, vocally noting the price of an item, and I can remember feeling like a stud anytime the register would still be chattering away for a couple of minutes after I completed my run. It typically happened when I'd rapidly be typing in coupons, which we didn't scan in those days. I'd finish up, and the machine would blather on and on, "50-credit, 75-credit, 35-credit ..."

You never -- and I mean never -- see a checker perform at that kind of pace today. I have a theory that speed is no longer a priority at most grocery stores. Management doesn't want to expedite your visit, it wants to prolong it -- so you'll buy more stuff.

Think about it. H-E-B, Walmart, whatever store it is, wants you to treat your shopping as an experience, an extended stay. Come in, pick up your balloon, stop at the sample trays and don't forget the buddy bucks for the kids!

As such, the checkers piddle and puddle along leisurely, with not a care in the world. Janet and I were shopping at H-E-B over the weekend, and the checker began chatting with the customer in front of us (fine), eventually to the point where she literally stopped what she was doing and stood there with an item in her hand, waiting to be both scanned and bagged (not fine).

But, what are you going to do? This is the world we live in. And you've got to eat. It's not like I can grow Lean Cuisine dinners in my backyard.

However, there are those brief moments, those flashes in time, when I relive the glory days. If a sacker has yet to find his or her way to our register, I've been known to jump over to the end of the counter and begin bagging away, fully aware that my bags will lead to easier and more logical toting later.

So that's where I was Saturday night, blissfully lost in my work when I was interrupted by a friendly, young 21st-century sacker.

"Can I help you with that sir?" he asked without really asking. Trust me, I know. It's sacker-code for, "Move out of the way so my boss doesn't see a customer doing his own sacking."

But that's not what was spoken. All that was spoken was, "Can I help you with that, sir?"

I reluctantly moved back to my side of the grocery-store tracks, back to Customer Land. But what I really wanted to do is ask a question in response:

"I don't know. Can you?"