Her thumb pressed into the peel, deliberately bruising the bananas I had so carefully selected for my father.
For the third week in a row, she put on her little show for the other shoppers. A public search of my groceries, a loud performance implying I was a thief. My crime was buying the same items every Saturday for my dad’s strict diet.
This woman with a name tag and a petty grudge got off on the humiliation she caused, basking in the glow of the flashing red assistance light.
Brenda thought her stage was the self-checkout lane, but her grand finale would be a black-and-white performance for corporate security, brought on by the beautiful, undeniable mathematics of a well-documented grudge.
The Gospel of Bananas and Kale: A Saturday Morning Ritual
The weight of the grocery list felt heavier than the paper it was printed on. It was a sacrament, my Saturday morning ritual. At fifty, my life was a series of well-worn grooves, and this was the deepest one. Coffee at 6 a.m., a quick check-in call with my son, Leo, at college, and then the pilgrimage to Market Basket for my dad. Dad, Arthur, was a creature of habit and declining health, which meant his diet was a tightrope walk of low sodium and high fiber. My list was his gospel: organic kale, russet potatoes, boneless chicken breast, and always, a bunch of bananas, still slightly green.
My husband, Mark, called it my “weekend penance,” but it wasn’t. It was love, translated into Tupperware containers stacked neatly in Dad’s fridge. As an accountant, I found comfort in the order of it all. Debits and credits, assets and liabilities. You put in the work, you get a balanced ledger. Shopping was the same. You follow the list, you fill the cart, you feed your father. Simple.
The self-checkout was my preferred exit. It was efficient, anonymous. I liked the clean, satisfying beep of the scanner, a tiny affirmation that, yes, this item is accounted for. I laid out my items like a surgeon arranging tools. Kale, potatoes, broth, chicken. The bananas were last. I tapped the screen, found the four-digit code for organic bananas I had long since memorized, and weighed them. Beep. Done. I paid with a tap of my phone and began bagging, a Tetris master of the reusable tote.
“Ma’am.”
The voice was flat, bored. I looked up. A woman with a strained ponytail and a name tag that read ‘Brenda’ stood beside the checkout station, her arms crossed over her red smock.
“I’m going to have to do a random audit on your order.” She didn’t make eye contact, instead staring at my cart as if it had personally offended her.
“Oh. Okay.” I was annoyed, but it was store policy. A minor inconvenience. A wrinkle in the routine. She tapped a few buttons on her handheld device and a red light on my station began to flash. The automated voice announced, “ASSISTANCE IS NEEDED AT THIS REGISTER.” Of course it was.
A Minor Inconvenience
Brenda moved with the enthusiasm of a sloth on sedatives. She picked up my receipt, her eyes scanning the list with a theatrical slowness. I could feel the gazes of the people in the adjacent lines. A middle-aged woman’s Saturday morning grocery run was hardly a spectacle, but the flashing light and the official-looking employee made it one.
“Says here you have organic bananas,” she mumbled, her finger tracing the line on the thin paper.
“Yes, they’re right there.” I pointed to the bunch sitting on top of my bag of potatoes.
She ignored me, leaning over the bagging area. She began to pull items out of my tote, placing them back on the scanner one by one. The chicken, clammy in its plastic wrap. The carton of broth. The bag of potatoes. She handled them like they were evidence at a crime scene. I felt a hot flush creep up my neck. This wasn’t an audit; it was an excavation. People were openly staring now.
“Just need to check everything, ma’am. It’s the rules.” Her voice was louder now, pitched for the audience she had gathered. She was performing.
I clenched my jaw and said nothing. I’m an accountant. I understand procedure. But there was a difference between procedure and… this. This felt personal. She was making a show of it, a little power play in her fluorescent-lit kingdom. She held up the kale, then the bananas, comparing them to the receipt as if she were deciphering ancient hieroglyphs. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, she grunted.
“Okay. It’s all here.”
She offered no apology for the delay or the public rummaging. She just stabbed a button on the screen, the red light went out, and she walked away. I was left to repack my groceries, my face burning with a mixture of embarrassment and indignation. I shoved everything back into the tote, the careful Tetris game ruined, and pushed my cart toward the exit, the squeak of a wobbly wheel sounding like a mocking laugh.
The Echo at Home
“She just dumped your bag out? In front of everyone?” Mark asked later, pausing with a forkful of eggs midway to his mouth.
I was re-stacking the dishwasher, my movements still jerky with residual anger. “Not dumped, exactly. More like… ceremoniously disemboweled. She took every single thing out. And she did it so slowly.”
“Sounds miserable. Why didn’t you just use a regular cashier?”
I stopped, a soapy plate in my hand. It was the logical question, the one that made perfect sense. It was also the one that made my teeth grind. “Because I shouldn’t have to,” I said, my voice tighter than I intended. “I’ve used self-checkout for years. It’s faster. I did nothing wrong. Why should I have to change my routine because some woman with a power trip decides to make my morning a living hell?”
Mark held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. I get it. It’s the principle of the thing.”
He did get it, but he didn’t feel it. He hadn’t been the one standing there, groceries splayed out like a confession, while a stranger with a name tag implicitly accused him of theft. He hadn’t felt the dozen pairs of eyes burning into his back, the whispers and the stares. It was the injustice of it. I’m a rule-follower. I balance ledgers to the penny. I pay my taxes on time. The idea of being treated like a common thief over a bunch of bananas was a profound insult to the very core of my being.
“It was just… humiliating,” I finally said, placing the plate in the rack with a soft clink.
“Well, hopefully it was just a one-time thing,” Mark said, turning his attention back to his breakfast. “Statistically, you’re probably good for another ten years before you get ‘randomly selected’ again.”
I wanted to believe him. I really did. But the image of Brenda’s smug, bored face was seared into my brain. It wasn’t random. I couldn’t prove it, not yet, but I knew in my gut that it wasn’t.
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