Tazeen Ahmad - The Checkout Girl

‘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.

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.

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.