The best time to go grocery shopping is around 9pm. The mood is just right: mostly empty, but not eerily so; the employees are relaxed and ready for small talk, whereas earlier they’d be too busy and later too tired.
The cast of characters in the supermarket changes vastly depending on the time of day. People who live on schedules, have families, have their life together, they’re all gone by then. All that’s left are the shoppers who chose to be there or had to be there (like me, hungry with nothing in the fridge), and the employees who are there because they aren’t going anywhere else. The 9pm supermarket is a place devoid of ambition.
So I go at 9pm, grab a cart from just outside the door, and wheel her in. She seems to have a little more trouble turning than usual, but I maneuver. Fill her up with bread. cheese. milk. bacon. beer. that pre-cooked chicken designed exactly to appeal to lazy 9pm shoppers. I feel like such a tool as I toss it into my grungy little cart. Then I go to check out.
That’s where it all goes wrong.
I wheel the little cart up to the only checkout with a human in it. I recognize her of course; she works evenings. I’m still expecting things to go as usual at this point, because I haven’t figured it out yet. I’m the only one who hasn’t figured it out. Why is she just standing there? Staring down with a frown?
We are both still and silent for a moment.
I’m still wondering why she isn’t checking out groceries. And then she drops a truth bomb that will reverberate in my brain ‘till the end of my days:
“Oh,” I say, immediately dismissing that fact as irrelevant to the current situation. Why isn’t she checking out my groceries?
“See,” she continues, “It says:” and I honestly cannot remember what supermarket that cart was branded with, because I considered it completely irrelevant, but she read the label out loud for me.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “I didn’t notice.”
She stands still another moment, and then emits an “oh dear.”
“Yeah, well, we’ll survive,” I say, and start handing her groceries. The checkout process begins.
I find myself pondering the idea that she doesn’t work checkout at 9pm because she likes working checkout but because she doesn’t have the ability or will to get past the tiniest bumps along her path.
“Where’d you even get this cart?” she says, as she stops again, as if unable to solve the problem of how to check out groceries from an unfamiliar cart.
It’s funny how she tries to put me on the defensive, as if I’d wronged her by bringing in this godforsaken cart. I wonder if she’s looking for an apology or something.
“Yeah, it was just sitting right outside the door,” I say, and help her with the groceries again. “I guess someone left it there after taking it to their car from the other place.” Oh god, am I really explaining myself to her?
“Well, it’s not our cart,” she says.
I try to imagine a world, a perspective, in which this is a problem. I wonder what it’s like to be her, to look at that cart and see it as an obstacle, rather than something so trivial as to go unnoticed. Maybe I’m the crazy one, over-generalizing as mathematicians are wont to do, thinking that the general case of grocery cart can be combined with the general case of grocery checkout lane. Maybe I’m the one in the wrong, treating all grocery stores and grocery carts as equal, when here is a specific case: an individual life to whom her individual place of employment matters.
The last of the groceries go through, and we chat the usual checkout chatter, about non-cart-related things. A bagger arrives and helps put stuff in one bag while I do the other. The checkout lady wanders off.
“You know,” the bagger says, “this isn’t our cart.”
“Yeah, it was just outside the door and I took it without noticing,” I reply, still wondering why the hell anyone cares.
“I know, I saw you,” he says. “Have room for this?” he hands me the half-gallon of milk, a bottom-of-the-bag item, and I glance over to see his bag is almost completely and optimally packed to the brim.
“Yeah, got a spot right here,” I say, slipping the milk down to the bottom of my comparatively sloppy bag.
“You see, this cart has a lower carriage…” he begins, and starts detailing the differences between this cart and their official supermarket-owned carts.
I suddenly have a vision of carts as he sees them. He is an expert. He knows carts in a way I never will. I imagine him efficiently locating and gathering this store’s carts from the parking lot, knowing them instantly even from blurry far-off silhouettes in the dark and the rain, knowing them by the feel of how they roll and turn, knowing which store a shopper is coming from even when he’s facing away because he knows the sound. I imagine him seeing me take this foreign cart and pushing it through the store gathering groceries and all he can see is the glaring wrongness of the cart, so obviously different, wondering: how can I possibly not notice?
How can I go through this little portion of my life ignorantly dismissing what is so plain and clear to everyone around me?
I leave, and they seem glad to be rid of me, and the cart. If you don’t hear from me again, I’ve probably been arrested for accidentally driving my groceries home in some random person’s car.
