TalentTrove

I pull into the littered parking lot knowing that it is going to be a busy evening. As I stand for a moment watching the steady lines of people entering the store, I wonder what kind of challenges the night will present. Dawning an official-looking blue shirt and backpack, I make my way through the aged double doors of the store that I've come to think of as my second home. For the past eight months, I've reported to Conways five days a week to help keep the store's isles clean, the shelves stocked, but, most of all, the customers happy. They tell us that the customer is always right. I've been here almost a year and am starting to have my doubts about that theory.
You can tell a lot about a person by the way they shop. Grocery shopping is one of the few basic shared human experiences that haven't been replaced by a computer or gadget.
As I start bagging groceries for a customer I think about the idea that right at this moment, some brilliant scientist could be thinking up a machine that will one day do my job. As I slave over mops and spilled spaghetti sauce for six hours a day, there's someone out there thinking up a way to make me obsolete. But then again, some days I wonder if I'm not already turning into some sort of robot. After all, I've been here less than a year and I bag with no thought to it at all. Make a wall, bread on top...its all second nature to me now. I often find myself thinking about math homework or the latest movie I want to see while bagging. So maybe retail has already created its own robots. After all, you'd have to be somewhat robotic to handle the daily grind of management, customers, and the never-ending barrage of shopping carts that need to be brought in out of the parking lot.
People say I look like Harry Potter. And by people, I mean every other customer. It's funny that every time someone tells me I look like Harry Potter, they say it as if they think it's the first time I've heard it. I can only hear so many of the same jokes so many times before they get a tad old.
Customers are always telling me things I've heard before: the prices are too high, the guy in the deli didn't cut the ham right, the music playing over the intercom sucks. The underlying theme is that I have absolutely no control over any of them. It isn't often that I hear someone complain about something that I can actually do something about. Other than bagging cleaning products with produce or putting the bread on the bottom of the bag (the ultimate sin of bagging), there isn't a whole lot that I can do wrong, which is actually kind of nice.