How to Be a Good Person Even When You Are Hungry and It's Late
Dealing with last-minute shoppers and seeing yourself reflected in the algorithm.
1.
Nearly three years working at this grocery store and I still haven’t made peace with the fact that we get a rush of 30 or 50 customers showing up just minutes before close.
I’ve been on my feet six or seven hours at this point and that’s definitely part of it, is that I’m already irritable, but another (uglier) way of putting it is this: patience and sympathy and forgiveness are not reflexive byproducts of my character. They require focus, and focus requires energy, and at the end of a long day doing work I don’t enjoy, I can do a remarkable job of litigating, like a gospel, my judgment of these customers’ character.
Get me hungry, get me tired, and like water into wine I’ll make villains of strangers.
2.
That’s a “Me” problem. I know it.
Another problem is that young professionals who come sprinting into a grocery store at 8:51 p.m., when they know it closes at 9, tend not to know what they want.
Last-minute customers show up running, breathless, eager to beat the clock — but once they’ve made it, they slow down. They mosey.
Everybody’s urgent about entering the store before it closes; nobody’s urgent about leaving the store before it closes.
3.
Most grocery stores, in their closing hour, sell more alcohol, candy, baked and frozen foods than at any other hour of the day.
The last-minute grocery shopper doesn’t grab a cart because they “only came for one thing” but they were hungry and so, look, their arms are full with french fries and bread and olive oil and frozen meals and wine and candy and OOPS one of the bottles just slipped their flooded grasp and POPPED on the floor, sounds exactly like a gunshot but don’t worry, we’ll get it cleaned, you just keep on shopping, the store falling quieter around you, and the night beyond it darker, intersection blinking yellow and yellow and yellow against the storefront glass, the world softly paused so that you may finish your shopping. Lone Customer. Burden to no one.
4.
The reason those customers are at the grocery store so late is that they procrastinated.
The reason they procrastinated is because, just like me, they’d rather not be here.
These people are no less tired than I am.
5.
Conan O’Brien is being interviewed and says that his brain sees comedy as work, so it’s never relaxing. His wife’ll want to pour wine and watch a sitcom after dinner but he can’t do that chocolatey melt with it, the way she (and everyone else) does.
The jokes, the cuts, the laugh track — “I see the seams.”
The interviewer asks him what he watches to unwind. O’Brien says he watches documentaries. Anything about World War Two. And the algorithm knows him well.
Says when he opens up Netflix the screen just comes alive with swastikas...
6.
YouTube knows I watch lots of true crime stuff and occasionally the algorithm feeds me some dramatic courtroom footage, maybe 20 seconds long, with an AI voiceover helping situate the drama, telling me who’s good and who’s bad.
Most of the court dramas you find on YouTube Shorts fall into two categories:
a disrespectful defendant gets PWND by a no-nonsense judge;
a corrupt cop gets outed, embarrassed, held accountable.
The algorithm seems to think I don’t care who gets justice (arrestor, arrested) so long as justice prevails.
That would be flattering if it were true.
But really what these videos are showing is someone getting punished who deserves to get punished. #JusticeServed. A warming diversion for somebody who feels their life maybe lacks it.
7.
A few years ago Jonathan Franzen was asked by a non-American interviewer about mass shootings, of which there were more every year. I don’t remember his exact words but it was something like: Imagine each victim having maybe 100 people who know and care about them. Old friends. Distant relatives. All those people are grieving. Multiply that grief by however many victims at a given shooting and the amount of suffering quickly spirals into abstraction.
William T. Vollmann, in Rising Up and Rising Down, quotes a diary from someone in Soviet Russia (I think) who said, about her ostensible indifference to other people’s suffering, that if she were to stop and grieve, even say a prayer, for every person she’d heard was shot, or disappeared or persecuted in some way, she would never get anything done.
It’s an awkward idea but it clears things up: grief, after a certain point, is afforded by calories, time, money you can spare.
In situations that demand huge amounts, even a conscientious person starts to budget.
8.
One way to maybe broaden that budget is to plant yourself in the moment. Not worry about the other things you could be doing if not for the fact that you were here, where you’d rather not be.
Fact is, this is where you are.
Trying to be someone who doesn’t have to be here, comparing yourself to that alternate self, is a drain on the budget.
Then do like George Smiley does in The Honorable Schoolboy, by John Le Carre, trying to coax information from a reluctant subject whose own suffering, he’s beginning to realize, is very much like his own:
“Smiley was acting himself,” writes Le Carre, “but more so”.
Thanks for reading Big Reader Bad Grades. There are about 200 new subscribers this week, which is a bit of a shock, and if you’re one of them, I hope you’re enjoying the regular stuff — if so, be sure to check out my new/debut book, CUBAFRUIT, available in digital and paperback.
I know working at a grocery store is not "fun" like working at a bookstore.....but as someone who works retail, at a bookstore, damn do I feel this. It's two minutes to close, I've been on my feet all day, I've lifted stacks upon stacks of books, shelved maybe three hundred, and all I want is a sandwich and to sit down, then someone walks in and says "Yes I made it!" and then proceeds to just browse around...yes, I see them as a villain.
Anyway, I love your writing.
"In situations that demand huge amounts, even a conscientious person starts to budget."
My wife spent six years as a social worker in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, trying to help people who were living the hardest life you can live in twenty-first-century America. One very important lesson she learned early on is that if you try to empathize with the people you're helping, you will burn out in a week. So you don't think about how horrible it must be to get kicked out of your apartment because you're schizophrenic and collecting old TVs and stereos so that multiple sources of sound are always playing to help drown out the voices in your head. Instead you just...help the person find a new apartment.