October 4, 2011
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Coupons.
After discussing with my students who work at Supermarkets and seeing my roommate compulsively watch “Extreme Couponing,” I decided I had to share my life and times working as a bagger, with a college degree.
I was lucky enough to even find a job when I received my degree from Bridgewater State. While I was working towards getting those last 6 credits a semester after I was projected to graduate I worked at a small market in the South End on Boston. I loved it there. I was living in Central Square, Cambridge and biking to and from work everyday. I met all these interesting people from ballerinas to jazz musicians to restaurant owners and even Cameron Diaz once. My rent, however, was very high and my room was very small and I soon had a nervous breakdown and moved home with my parents.
That was in December. I applied to places all over Worcester and stumbled upon a job as a bagger at $haw’s $upermarkets (name altered for legal reasons). I landed the job a corporate market now, but a market all the same. Thanks to my father, who used to be a political columnist in Worcester, it could’ve been my references: Lt. Governor Tim Murray, Congressman James McGovern and District Attorney Joe D. Early, hah!
My first couple weeks were fine. They kept asking if I wanted to be trained as a cashier. I always denied. I wanted to just show up for 6 hours do my remedial job and go home and write and tell jokes at night. That’s what I did. It was paid people watching. I was able to develop jokes off what I saw and heard right there at the store. Sometimes that got me into trouble, because I’d be bagging some soccer mom’s groceries and my manager, who’d be the cashier, would read my hand: “Movie-like crotch punch,” and get angry.
Eventually, no matter how much I tried to cunningly avoid cashier training, I had to. They said I was going to lose my job completely if I didn’t agree to the training. Which in hindsight, makes zero sense. They threatened to fire me because they needed a new cashier and I refused to do it. So now because they fired me, they had to hire not only a new cashier, but the bagger they lost too.
Despite their lack of logic and my missed opportunity to call them out on it, I was trained.
I hated the job. It wasn’t that it was hard, because it’s not hard at all. It was that I had more responsibility for a company I couldn’t stand behind and people I don’t care about.
I started my rebellion small. Every time a shopper owed a change amount just over the dollar amount I would slide them right along, not asking them for it. For instance their bill would come to $14.03 and they just handed me a $20. I would give them $6 and say “have a nice day.”
And then I met the most beautiful woman in the world on a fateful Sunday afternoon, where I was already receiving time and a half for my brain-numbing job. She, in truth, wasn’t actually beautiful. Kind of heinous to be polite. If you took the green tint off of the Looney Tunes witch and gave her grayer hair, that would be this woman. But boy did she make everything worth it there.
She was a couponer. She would come in with all kinds of coupons for all kinds of deals. Buy one get one, 10%, 20%, %50, competitor’s coupons, retail coupons, you name the type she had them, and for any situation and for whatever she needed. She didn’t buy thousands of dollars worth of groceries like you see on those TV shows. She bought her necessities and paid almost nothing for them. And always she would freeze the computer or need a million price checks and even had a system as to how she wanted to have the groceries put on the bill. And this drove my supermarket crazy. They hated it and hated that I would take her. Every time she was buying groceries it was a guaranteed 45 minutes to an hour at the register so she could make sure she was paying the least amount of money without stealing.
She might as well been stealing in the eyes of my managers at $haw’s. They despised her, it looked like that picture of Larry Bird and Dr. J holding each other’s throats during a Sixers/Celtics game when they spoke. It excited me. The fact that I didn’t have to really work for an hour, that I was screwing over this company and that my bosses, who gave me horrible hours and treated me like I was an extra-chromosomed monkey, hated her presence.
This couponer made me realize the value of a dollar, to work hard no matter what exactly your situation is and that you should never be too proud because you don’t know where you’ll end up next. It was the best lesson to learn, from an unlikely source.
During that time it was embarrassing to tell the community that were friends with my parents or my friend’s parents that this was where I was working at 22 with a college degree. And this woman with the coupons helped me.
I tell my students now that you’ll never know where you’ll end up. I never thought I’d be telling any students, period, that. Especially as I was bagging those groceries.
I also tell them the three keys to be successful:
1.) Work as hard as you can, at everything you can.
2.) Get your degree, whatever degree it is.
3.) Walk like you’re a model on a runway, confidence exudes success.
Thank you coupon lady. A part of the reason I am where I am today, is you. And I couldn’t be more thankful for a buy one experience, get one experience free.
