Yes That One

How to make the best of your shopping experience.

1.

A customer asked me on Tuesday which of our olive oils is “the best olive oil” and if I were a new employee it would make sense to ask him:

“What do you mean by ‘the best?’”

However I have worked here for three years which is long enough to know that when somebody asks which is the best item from a narrow selection of items — e.g., which of these three mustards is the alpha — the wisest thing you can do as an employee is simply point and say “that one” because here’s what the customer will do:

They’ll pick up the item you suggested and hold it at their sternum and look down at a steep angle. “This one.” They'll say it like a question but there is no question mark in their voice.

Here’s what you say: “yes that one.”

Then, without looking at you, they'll ask, “Why this one?”

And you will say, “Because it is the best.”

It is easy as a rookie retail employee to hear someone ask you a question and think that what’s happening is a conversation but no: it is a dance, and you are the pole.

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2.

One of my colleagues is from Germany. Her name is Erma. She’s got eyeballs that're a bright celestial blue and roughly a Honda’s breadth of bright blonde curls in her early 50s. Erma has a hawkish eye for cosmetic surgery and she will lean almost compulsively toward the nearest uniform and whispers a barbed remark about a customer’s awful nose or Brazilian Butt Lift, aka “BBL,” which she pronounces Germanically as “beybel,” like the book about God, whispering like she wants to be discreet but also staring at the person, sometimes pointing.

Conversations with Erma are polite but offputting for reasons I've never been able to make sense of until Wednesday, when we were stocking eggs for an hour, and she kept asking me questions with such strange intonation and urgency and topical drift that I just quietly stopped answering, or nodding. Just kept shelving eggs. Quietly crushing the box . Opening another. Shelving more eggs.

Erma talked the whole time. When I stopped providing answers she started doing it herself. By the end of the hour she was doing two voices.

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3.

A colleague named Jaime got fired from this grocery store last year for talking back at customers and so he went two blocks down the road and got a job at a fancier grocery store.

I shop at that store because it’s closer to my apartment and he seemed bashful the first time I saw him there but eventually we chatted. He said the reason he quit shopping at the other store (the one I still work at) is that he made a scene when he got fired. Raised his voice and threw his gloves on the floor and snapped his fingers as he left. Now he’s embarrassed to go back.

I told him nobody's gonna care.

That was a month ago.

Then on Tuesday he showed up! Shopping briskly with a list.

He stood in the checkout line staring at his phone and came to my register. Gave a little wave from under his chin like in the He Man Woman Haters Club and I asked what made him finally shop here again.

Said he got fired from the other place and made an even bigger scene than last time.

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4.

A guy came into the store on Wednesday carrying two of the fancy Nike shoeboxes, the ones for their lux-brand sneakers, but there was something about the physics, I can't describe it, you could tell they were empty. He was clean-cut and his clothing was stylish but his backpack was overstuffed in a way that suggests homelessness. He stood quietly at the beer section a long time.

Eventually a manager asked if he needed help and that's when he started shouting. He was smiling and his teeth were big, straight, pearly but he was scolding the manager saying that people do this to him all the time, they pretend not to know him, when really his name is Tokyo, “the first Black-white-Asian freestylist to earn one million dollars through entrepreneurship,” and then righteousness shifted to something more smiley-sinister and, with a plaintive hand on his chest and lashes bat-batting like he just heard something offensive, he said, “Oh you caused my son to be homeless? Oh OK. Alright fine. See what happens when YOU get home and THAT’S a promise.”

Another manager came up, following the commotion like sugar in the air, and Tokyo pointed at her: “You and me had dinner last night, though, and now you think you-all can can can can can control the uh the whole criminal element in this community but that is your vanity.” Palm high like a preacher now and floating. “It is your vanity that has caused you to mistaken me for one OF them…”

The two managers lured him out the door on threads of conversation and I kept thinking, it is your vanity that has caused you to mistaken me for one OF them…

Told a colleague I had to pee and then went to the bathroom and typed it on my phone and afterward at the register I wondered which of the two realities he prefers, though I’m sure if I asked this he’d just pinch his brow, like I’m fucking with him, and answer in the typical tone: “Whichever one’s best.”