Friendship Comes Free at the Checkout

The human at the till might be the kindest soul I meet today. No self-checkout for me.

Textile artist Pacita Abad recreated a Korean grocery store in Los Angeles. The first major retrospective of her glorious work is on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario until January 19, 2025.

On senior discount day at Shoppers Drug Mart, I waited in line behind a wisp of a gent who looked over his shoulder, flashed a grin and murmured something saucy meant for me.

“Andrew! Don’t tease the lady!” said the cashier, mock-censorious.

He twinkled, leaning on his cane. “I was teasing you.”

“Doesn’t work anymore!” Her smile said it did. They had a dance, those two. The hunt for Andrew’s loyalty card, the 101 she delivered (twice, very slowly) on his discount. Andrew slipped off his backpack. Waited while the cashier filled it with the makings of a frugal week for one. Turned, with much deliberation, so she could set it back in place, give it a smooth and look him over.

“Got your stick, Andrew? How about your card? You wouldn’t want to forget your card.” Something gleamed on the belt: Andrew’s credit card, which the cashier slipped into his wallet with tenderness light as a spider’s web.

“You’re very good at your job,” I said. Except it wasn’t just a job. I had witnessed one friend’s care for another. Andrew’s family might be hours away, his former classmates and colleagues long gone. At the checkout, he matters to someone.

I’m old-fashioned when it comes to checkout lines. I’d rather hand my purchases to a human than follow prompts from a mechanized voice. Unlike my husband, who hotfoots it to the fastest line and will dispatch me to the second-fastest in case a bad call might cost us a few minutes, I don’t mind shuffling my feet if I can study human nature while I’m at it. The pandemic, with its frenzy of pings from my Instacart shopper of the day, left me grateful to cruise the aisles among my own kind. What I’m really buying isn’t just the touch-tested clementines. It’s the face-to-face connection—sometimes even hand-to-hand—with another living soul.

My mother raised me on tales of kindness at the till back in the days of gramophones and garters. Her parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia, ran general stores in one hard-luck prairie town after another. The only Jews wherever they landed, the Brusers made friends to make a living. Boris had a soft spot for kids and a free hand with the candy. Rona, my namesake, shared the secret of her famous babka. My future mother, the family pride, composed letters for neighbors who signed their names with an X.

I used to wonder what these niceties had to do with me. Then one evening in my years of nonstop meetings and late nights at the office, I ducked into the supermarket for a couple of boneless chicken breasts, only to find myself trapped in a checkout line headed by a flustered and error-prone cashier. At this rate I’d be lucky to throw dinner on the table by 8:30. Impatience rippled up and down the line as the cashier said, weeping, “I’m sorry. It’s my first day.”

Up spoke a shopper with the bearing of a queen. “It’s okay, hon. We’ve all been new, and we all remember the feeling.”

Click. I happened to be new at work myself, perplexed by the unforeseen mysteries of the top job at a women’s magazine. An editor-in-chief can get her bearings behind a closed door. A cashier must learn the ropes in full view of her customers. The young woman wiping her eyes that night had the honesty and heart to be someone’s favorite cashier, maybe even mine. Command of the machine would come in time.

A checkout line is a community in miniature. Downtown St. Petersburg, Florida, where we used to escape Toronto winters, won my heart for its obvious charms: morning walks amid the palms on Tampa Bay; neighborhoods that wore their cobblestoned, pastel-painted beauty the way Diane Keaton wears a bowler hat; the lulling sense that anything we fancied, from a first-rate Cubano to a ramble through an art museum, was only minutes from our door. No one ever tells visitors like us, “Don’t miss the Publix on Third Street.” Yet my defining memories of St. Pete include the checkout team who sold me a shopping cart there.

I planned to toss my canned goods into the cart, then stroll over to the farmer’s market for the serious provisioning. No such luck: The cart required assembly, and I have no gift for such things. It was early, the store nearly empty. So I asked the friendly team at the cash (one to ring up, one to bag) what I’d never ask the lone clerk at any till back home in Toronto: “Do you think you could give me a hand?”

They gave it their best shot. Perused the instructions, noted prominent mention of needle nose pliers. We decided I would leave my cans and cart at the customer service desk, to be collected with the car later that day. Needle nose pliers aren’t part of our travel kit, but surely our landlord had a pair.

Around 6, with borrowed needle nose pliers waiting on the kitchen counter, I returned to pick up my cart. There it stood behind the desk, fully assembled, my groceries tucked inside. Someone on the team had tracked down the pliers and spent his break putting them to use. He had done his good deed unseen, with no expectation of reward.

The way my mother told it, her parents’ customers were a fickle bunch. Some customers bought on credit, then left the bill unpaid if the harvest failed. Others disappeared when a gentile-owned store came to town. I would do better by whoever assembled my cart—a minimum-wage employee, I’m guessing. No one on duty could tell me who he was, so I sang his praises in a note to the Publix website—and then a second note when my first got a brushoff that smacked of AI. According to the real human being who finally noticed my gratitude, the young man was commended for his service.

This winter we won’t be returning to the green bungalow in St. Pete. Our former landlord got a hankering to live there himself, and he has no use for my shopping cart. As for my young benefactor at the till, I hope his kindness landed him a raise and a spot on the promotion track. I’ll never know his views on gay marriage, abortion rights or the outcome of Tuesday’s election. My catastrophe might well look to him like relief. Yet as Kamala Harris said in her graceful and grounded concession speech, we champion American ideals “in the way we live our lives, by treating one another with kindness and respect, by looking into the face of a stranger and seeing a neighbor.” This I know for sure: If an Andrew shows up at the Publix on Third, he’ll be in the best of hands with my wizard of the needle nose pliers.

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Okay, my friends, your turn. Checkout clerk or self-checkout: where do you head? Any current or former checkout clerks among us? What’s your favorite place for observing kindness in action?

For more stories about how we can lift and inspire one another, join me on a tour of my urban neighborhood. Or head back in time to my summer job at Holiday Inn, where I learned how rewarding it can be to troubleshoot for a weary traveler.

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