I Object: Self Objectification

The lines to checkout were interminable, thrusting from their defined confines through high traffic areas and into the aisles.  “Saturday morning shopping,” he sighed.  He looked down to his shopping cart, empty save a box of frosted strawberry pop tarts and whitening toothpaste.  He came shopping this morning for the express purpose of getting only one of these necessities and it wasn’t the toothpaste.  That had been an impulse buy.  “Buy,” he harrumphed.  “Well, not yet.” 

He studied the lines carefully, scanning each cashier, analyzing their manner and affect to discover who was the most motivated, the trait he found translated into cashiers who worked quickly and were the least likely to have a long friendly conversation with someone ahead of him in line.  The length of the line was merely a secondary consideration. 

His eyes alit upon Register 3, manned by a woman in her mid-forties with bushy eyebrows and a droopy jowl.  She wasted no smiles for the customers, but her hands moved at a harried pace as she scanned boxes of spaghetti and aspirin for the old man at her counter.  Just as he settled at the back of the line, the placard designating “Self Checkout 5” flickered to life. 

It seemed as if the entire store arrived to the same conclusion simultaneously, as a wave of people and produce, carts and canned goods crashed onto the open register.  Through luck, or sheer force of will, he somehow managed a favorable position, next in line behind a blonde woman, smacking her gum as she slowly and deliberately scanned her items.

“Self Checkout.”  He hated Self Checkout.  It wasn’t the scanning of items that troubled him.  He was a cashier in another life, when he was 16 and optimistic.  No, he was as fast and efficient as any cashier working there today.  Most troubling was the unwritten rule of the Self Checkout, the physical self-assessment, the judging of one's own physical attributes.  

As the blonde continued scanning his items, he looked past her at the two-way mirror.  Behind that mirror, he knew, the store manager poured over accounts and supply orders.  Ostensibly, the mirror provided the manager purview of his domain.  In actuality, the mirror being situated by these registers belied the true intent of the supermarket: a tool to aid customers in their Self Checkout. 

He didn’t know why people preferred this to real cashiers.  Maybe they’ve developed the ability to lie to themselves.  Even the term “Self Checkout” was demoralizing, as by its very nomenclature, one had to completely disregard personality.  It was, as its title announced, a pure physical assessment and it always depressed him.

The sound of the blonde’s receipt being printed stirred him from his reverie.  As she spun one more time in the mirror, he steeled his resolve and resigned himself to his fate.  At least he could drown his sorrows in Pop Tarts when he got home.