I’ve worked in two different stores over several years now, one larger warehouse-type that saw a lot of lower income and food stamps, and now a swankier local neighborhood place that gets a lot of housewives and retirees. Over this time, I’ve learned a couple things that I just gotta get off my normal-sized chest:
- There is a direct and dramatic correlation between how people look and what food they’re buying. I am literally to the point where I can see a customer from some 20 feet away and without even seeing their cart, give stunningly accurate predictions about what they’re gonna buy. It’s become a bit of a game for me to test myself. And you guessed it, there is a direct correlation between fat people and certain foods. Trust me, it works like clockwork. I can nearly always see it coming a mile away. I promise, every kind of person, from which wines they’re getting to organic vs. regular veggies, each and every one of you is predictable.
- Tumblrina fatties claiming they eat clean, so many salads, so much chicken breast, much healthy, very 800 calorie starve? Bullshit. You can’t hide from your checkout girl. To build on the first point, I know what you’re gonna buy before you even get within smelling distance, and it ain’t our entire organic veggie selection. You are as predictable as your inevitable heart attack, and none of your delusional claims of healthy eating hold any merit. I know you think I’m just some minimum-wage loser, but I’m better at judging people than you think.
- On that note, lots of folks, especially ones as self-absorbed as fatties, think service personnel are invisible, that we don’t see you and what you buy, that we don’t recognize correlations. When I first started cashiering way back when, I lost 10 pounds in the first two months without even trying. You know why? Because I lost my appetite at some of the people and foods in my line. It wasn’t conscious decisions; but when you see certain things over and over again, with people who look like they’re oozing the last of their humanity out of their folds, you kind of just never want to touch them again.
- “Tee hee I’m having a big party this weekend, I don’t always eat like this but gotta celebrate tee hee!” why the fuck you lying why you always lying mmmmm oh my god stop fucKING LYING
- Literally nothing in my life has made me more health-conscious as working grocery. When you see these ridiculous correlations between physical appearance and cart contents time and time again, it becomes a visceral reaction to things. I never meant to judge people on their purchases; I started this work with really no strong feelings towards fat people. But now? Now I’ve had enough of their wads of wrinkled cash pulled out of grimy pockets. I’ve had enough of the way they consistently treat me worse than any of my other customers. I’ve had enough of their whining about how they couldn’t find whatever shitty processed frozen disaster they’re used to shoving down their gullets by the boxful. I understand fat people to an almost disgusting degree, because there’s no expectation in a grocery store; people come in wearing pajamas and buying all their most embarrassing vices. I see them at the points they’d never dare post on Instaham, with the foods they’ll swear they never eat.
- There is literally nothing quite so terrifying as an angry whale whose scootypuff battery has died in the middle of the center aisle. Pray for whichever cart boy has to find them a new one.
- If you get even the slightest hint that I'm judging you, trust me, I am. If you're in any way fat and you don't think I am, don't worry; I'm just good at hiding it.
Sorry for the length. Long time lurker, first time poster, but let’s just say today was a whale of a shift.
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[–] organicgangbang ago
USA here so not familiar with those particular stores but we definitely have this phenomenon. Go to a Whole Foods and you see fashionable, fit young working women and mothers aged 20-50. Go to a Vons two blocks down and suddenly now half the store is poor and fat as fuck and wearing trashy obnoxious commercialized clothing.