texas joke

The weekend day shift at Randall's in Texas was the best way for part time checkers in high school to maximize their hours. Sunday was the better shift because eighty percent of the local suburban population was at church until about ten thirty or about the time of the first break. You clock in at eight o’clock and if you were lucky, had fewer than ten people come through the check stand before your first break. In between customers, it was simple to walk over to the bakery for donuts and to the deli for a fountain drink.

An interesting facet of the early Sunday shift was a regular recurrence of certain customers. Habitual Sunday morning grocery shoppers are a nuanced folk and it is easy to gauge the level of conversation they are prepared to engage in.

One man who shopped regularly at this time would insist that everything he bought fit in one paper bag. The man would spend up to seventy-five dollars on groceries and request that it all fit in the same bag. More than a few times he probably really wanted to buy more than what would fit in one bag, but would eliminate the least essential items for the sake of convenience, consistency and being a memorable person.

A childfree couple aged around forty were also regular Sunday shoppers. They had recently moved to Houston from Southern California. When you informed them of your familiarity with that area they quickly confided their apparent disdain for the growth of Asian American populations by pulling back the abducting corner of each eye, adding, “lots of these”.

Another favorite was a kindly old man who liked to talk about golf.

In addition to the regulars, there were a few one off Sunday customers that are worth noting.

There only was one register open before ten for the entire store. This lead to the situation in which a popular, blonde, high school coed made an emergency run to the store before church services to buy tampons and only tampons from you.

The best customer of all time, however, didn’t come through the store until later in the afternoon at the busiest time of the week, the afternoon rush between noon and four o’clock. Then, checkout lines pushed three or four shoppers deep, most carrying a robust quantity of food.

Because Randall’s required checkers to unload groceries from carts, the express lane, fashioned with additional back support not on normal lanes, became a highly coveted position among Sunday cashiers.

At the Cash/Credit Only express lane, a man came through to purchase two twenty-four packs of domestic. He was a short Hispanic man around thirty years old, wearing an oversized black t-shirt with the phrase FUCK YOU I’M FROM TEXAS printed in a large font on the back. Unfortunately the gentleman didn’t recognize this lane could not accept the ATM Card he planned to use. In the time it took him to realize this the line had increased six-fold.

He found a blank check tucked away in his wallet with the suburban crowd swelling behind growing frustrated, angry and scared all at the same time. After calling the manager over on the store intercom to okay the payment, he had realized his fault. He apologized, remarked he wasn’t even from Texas and was apparently on his way over to a party with Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg in the house.