Job Description

Shopper’s Girl

In the past five years I have been a marketing associate, managerial intern, and a lifeguard but my all time favorite job was bagging groceries. Five days a week, eight hours a day: putting paper towels, meat, cans, chips and any grocery items in bags, in carts on stock shelves. If you have held the position of grocery bagger, you may be asking yourself, how could this be anyone’s favorite job? I will tell you.  

Shopper’s Corner, a grocery store in Santa Cruz, prides itself on locality and quality organic foods. It is sort of like the small grocery store out of a movie. Only girls work the front of the store and big burly men work the butchery. Locals call the girls that work the front ‘Shopper’s Girls.’ May be an antiquated reference but it stuck. To be a Shopper’s Girl is a rite of passage to being a true local in Santa Cruz. So, when I was fifteen I became a Shopper’s Girl. My duties included restocking aisles, cutting fruit, collecting grocery carts, and of course, bagging groceries.

A bagger’s role at Shopper’s Corner is comparable to three things…

·      Playing Tetris
·      Defending feminism
·      A party

Playing Tetris

Bagging groceries is not a hard thing to do. This is true. But when each register has a line of eight people, each with 25+ items, doing a proper job becomes a hard thing to do. As this was my first job I took pride in meeting the customer’s needs, so I learned to perfect bagging. All hard square items land at the bottom and soft at the top. This may seem obvious but there is a certain grey area that isn’t talked about, that I would like to discuss. Imagine there are eight items: Brie cheese, grapes, bread, avocado, peaches, a bottle of wine, a can of green beans, and a mango. Wine bottles are always laid down, so that must go in first. But then what? If you put in the can it might puncture the mango, but if you put in the mango all the other soft items will fall between the cracks and likely be crushed. This is where the Tetris came in handy. Like becoming familiar with different Tetrominoes, I soon became familiar with the ways of the groceries. Eventually, I was able to bag the groceries in such a way that the durable items would surround the softer items in such a way that they would have their own fortress in the middle of the bag, and nothing could touch them. All the empty space around this fortress was filled, making the bag easier to carry, as nothing would fumble when you picked it up. Easy as it may sound, doing this with speed was an ordeal at times. I liked to think I was the Matthew Buco[*] of bagging groceries.

Defending Feminism

Whenever there was a break between customers the girls would talk mainly about how fed up they had become with certain customers. I sort of didn’t understand it. They seemed to get so angry over little comments from certain customers. It seemed like a waste of energy. But as a rookie it was my job to shake my head along with them.

Then one of these certain customers shows up at my register. He proceeds to throw his bread at me which I let fall to the ground. “This isn’t a baseball field, you don’t need to throw your groceries at me” I say. “Lighten up sweetie” he replies. This, sadly, is a part of the service industry as a woman, the ‘sweeties’ and ‘honey’ or ‘sugar.’ So I ignored his comment and asked if he would like a bag. “Yeah, sexy, bag my groceries” he replies. Now I know I said this is just how it goes for women in the service industry, but at this moment I decided I would rather be fired than deal with this pig. I threw the bag at him and told him to bag his own and walked to a different register. Fortunately I was backed by the other girls and even bumped a notch from newbie to novice.

I realized that this was an active part of the job to defend myself as a woman. The reality is that those situations happen all the time and women in particular are often told that this is okay. I think it is up to us to put them in their place, and I was glad to learn that the Shopper’s Girls did too.

A Party

Every Thursday there is a community party on the beach in Santa Cruz, known as ‘the beach party,’ a very creative name. If an employee of Shopper’s Corner misses this party, they’re likely to receive a flurry of worried texts. “Are you okay?? Where are you?! Are you sick today?” Shopper’s butchers, Shopper’s produce team, the deli, and Shopper’s Girls can all be found at this party on Thursdays. And most Fridays consist of talking about what happened on Thursday. It may sound like a lot of messing around but as a rookie, I found these parties the best way to work my way up the rankings. Connecting with coworkers while dealing with customers and general work tasks can be hard, so this is where I got to put in the real work. Missing beach parties is like missing work; you don’t do it.

Another opportunity to make my way up the Shopper’s hierarchy came from the water, not the beach. Jim, the owner of Shopper’s Corner, also owns a charter company called Chardonnay. Twice a month employees are allowed to ride The Chardonnay for free and bring two friends. This is a great time for coworkers to get to know each other and their friends. Though the beach party and the boat rides are not required to work at Shopper’s, they might as well be. Like the beach party, The Chardonnay is not something to be missed.

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[*] Matthew Buco achieved the highest possible score in Tetris in 2012

Flesch Reading Ease: 76.2
Flesch Kincaide Reading Level: 6.4
Passive Sentences: 12%