Self Checkout

...receiving offerings in the moment

Photo Cliff Scholz

Standing at the self-checkout scanner at the local grocery, I motioned to the clerk standing nearby, who was more than a little busy monitoring the eight sales transactions taking place simultaneously. He approached.

Pointing at the screen, I explained, “It says, ‘Help is on the way.’ I didn’t ask for help.”

The clerk was a tall, middle-aged man I hadn’t seen there before. He wore a bar-coded employee badge on a lanyard around his neck. He waved his bar code over the same scanner I’d used to ring up my bar-coded vegetables. Suddenly I was seeing on my transaction screen the live image generated by the overhead security camera: there was my cart, the scanner, and off to the side the plastic bag holding my celery, limes and stuff, and my own balding head.

“This is probably it,” he said, bending down to remove a small fragment of green stuck in the wire of the lower basket of my mini cart. It looked like maybe a piece of a radish leaf or lettuce. It wasn’t much bigger than a postage stamp.

Having done so, he pushed a virtual button on the screen. That was the problem. The camera had detected an item in my cart.

I stood there, stunned by what I had just witnessed.

“That’s—” I began. I faltered. I was going to say, “—horrifying,” but I checked myself.

“Thank you,” I said instead, authentic gratitude welling up inside me for this person whose timely intercession on my behalf was gonna to help me get the hell out of there as fast as possible.

Resuming my place in front of the machine, I pushed the payment options button. “Cash, this time,” I’m thinking. “Make them take cash,” I’m thinking. “Keep using cash,” I’m reminding myself.

“Please insert coins before inserting bills,” the machine prompted. I reached a couple fingers into the change pocket of my jeans hoping I had eleven cents on me. Then the wallet for the bills. As I finished up and the machine spat out the receipt, the clerk said to me, “Do you hear that song?”

I listened. The checkouts were bustling with after-work shoppers. The music was low. I’m known for my good hearing but honestly I wouldn’t have focused on it if the clerk hadn’t asked.

“Barely,” I replied.

“It’s ‘Get Right Back to Where We Started From,’” he said. “It was in the movie, Slapshot. Did you ever see it?”

I gathered up my purchases. The place was packed. People were waiting. I looked over to my questioner, bemused. “No, I don’t think so,” I said.

“Paul Newman was in it,” he said, hoping to jog my memory.

It worked. I instantly went back in time to an era when I’d seen Paul Newman playing opposite Robert Redford in The Sting, a big hit movie in its time, and how I’d been so moved by the ragtime soundtrack that I learned how to play Scott Joplin’s Solace on the piano, though quite badly. And yes, it suddenly came back to me that Slapshot was from the same general mid-70s time period. Also with Paul Newman. You know how sometimes a series of memories and associations can run through your mind way faster than it probably took you to read this description of it? That’s what happened.

“Oh yeah, right. That’s an old one,” I affirmed, shopping bag in hand. Another shopper had already taken my place at the machine.

“They played this song twice in the movie,” he went on, animated and evidently encouraged. “While they were riding on the bus!”

“Wow. Good memory!” We completed our conversation with a smile and a nod and I was out the door.

Later, as I was chopping the celery I’d bought for soup, the interaction started to take on almost mythic significance.

First I considered the overhead view of myself that I’d seen on screen. Thinking of it now, I still find that disturbing. “The machine shall count the very hairs on thy head,” it seems. In my case that probably will not require a supercomputer, but I recalled the ominous black globes of the electronic eyes everywhere.

“What next?” I wondered, knife in hand at the cutting board. It isn’t too hard to imagine at some point in the foreseeable future a note displayed a mobile device, maybe something like this:

Imaging data from your recent transaction show a potentially cancerous mole on the back of your neck. We care about you. Click on the link to schedule an appointment with your nearest health professional.

Or maybe:

We scanned your wallet photos during your transaction and several of them do not match those in your social media library. These have been added to your photo library for your convenience and enjoyment. Thank you for shopping with us today!

Such scenarios are becoming increasingly plausible.

But then a bigger realization came to mind. Just hours earlier I had completed writing my November 20 Substack, “Reflexivity, Continued,” which featured a discussion at the end about Joseph in the Bible and how, dispossessed, enslaved in a foreign land and eventually imprisoned on false charges, he had found a way to make an offering, while locked up in a dungeon, by interpreting the dreams of his fellow prisoners. And how his offering had freed him.

And I realized, “Holy crap! I just encountered a modern-day Joseph!” It doesn’t matter where we are. It’s about what we’re offering.

The clerk was hearing something I was not tuned into, literally music coming from above, almost drowned in the din of daily commerce. You can take this as metaphorically as you like. He drew my attention to it. The sense I had was that by listening to the music he had found something to stay connected with himself in an environment that could easily degrade human beings and our experience of life. And he wanted to share it with me.

Seriously, I used to teach in a corrections facility — an actual jail — and there were fewer security cameras in there than what I saw in the store when I rang up my vegetables. But the point is, suddenly the grisly backdrop of the commercial enterprise surrounding us with all its electronic tethers, bars and chains took a step back, and for a minute or so this person and I could be human together.

And what was he drawing my attention to? A song. And as it turns out it’s a song about love, which in this person’s mind was associated with the movie Slapshot. From what I read and the clips I found online, this is a kind of a strange old movie about a failing hockey franchise that was revived by satisfying the bloodlust of its fan base with a lot of violence on the ice. So there’s definitely a surreal quality to the whole thing.

Then again, there was also a definite surreal quality to the experience this person and I were having at the self-checkout lanes. So in a way it all makes sense. As a culture, we’re kinda bonkers. And we have been for a while. But the important thing, the place where it’s not “surreal” but just plain ol’ real, was the human interaction that felt good in the moment and evolved into something even more meaningful on reflection.

That was the offering, and, like the idea shared a few weeks back in my posting here, “100,000 Shrines,” it was created entirely with elements already at hand.

And I must say, the sales clerk chose well among all the shoppers thronging about us. Not everyone might have been open to share such a moment. Maybe he cued into the simple fact that I was probably old enough to have been alive at the time the movie first came out, or maybe it was just something subtler than that. Point is, he found someone receptive to his sharing.

And yes, it was just a moment, that’s true. But that’s really all we get here on earth: a series of moments. Best to make the most of them, I figure. Best to make them count.