The Checkout Girl

Hooking up with Rebecca before I leave is the highlight of both our shifts. She’s anxious I’m going to leave if I don’t get my shift-change request approved. She’s right, I may have to.

When I get home I read a newspaper article about a forty-year-old woman who was asked for ID when buying alcohol in Tesco. She berates both the checkout girl and Tesco’s alcohol sales policy. The article is one-sided and I’m incensed. I’m desperate to write in and report the insidious way in which customers handle any request for ID. She may have been forty but judging by her photo (which I stare at for a while) yes, I may well have asked her for ID too.

Sunday, 4 January 2009 (#ulink_1ffde3d6-5fb1-581c-bff7-f627cbce728f)

There’s a picture in the paper of Gordon Brown’s online shopping arriving in the very plastic bags he has pledged to scrap. He wants to wipe out the ten billion plastic bags given out each year and has ordered supermarkets to cut the number they give out by 50 per cent by this May. I think that’s an over-ambitious target. An overwhelming majority of people are still coming to the tills asking for bags even though we keep them out of sight. Some ask for them as if they have no idea that landfills are full of an endless number of non-biodegradable bags. Others, usually the elderly, bring their ones back without fail. But most people seem to leave them in the car.

Thursday, 8 January 2009 (#ulink_64ff2fa3-b83d-5164-8762-81ca3241a828)

As news of Next’s and Debenhams’ drop in sales hit the headlines, the Boxing Day sales flurry is fast becoming a fading memory. But it’s not all doom and gloom; John Lewis has bucked the credit crunch curse and New Look has had a pretty robust performance over the festive period. My shift begins with news of Sainsbury’s Christmas sales making the headlines. The shop has beaten the national trend of retail gloom and enjoyed its ‘best ever Christmas performance’. Richard’s updated newsletter reports that ‘sales have shot through the roof’ over Christmas and that we all ‘provided excellent service at the checkouts, especially those who got into the Christmas spirit’.

It’s the astute Basics range that may pull the supersonic supermarket through this recession. Basics has seen a sales rise from 40 per cent a year ago. I’m certainly seeing it at the till as customers come to me, their trolleys laden with an entire shop from this range. An analyst quoted in the news says, ‘Sainsbury’s appears to be gauging the mood of UK consumers extremely well…It’s capitalising on its perceived offering of quality products, combining aggressive pricing promotions in the hope of capturing consumers’ desires to “feel good” in the face of an economic downturn while reducing expenditure.’ But he had a bleak warning too; with a vulnerable UK economy, the store was left more exposed than Tesco, which has an international portfolio.