The packing shelf
At some discount supermarkets the cashier doesn’t wait for you to pack. Everything is scanned at a speed nobody could keep up with and sent straight back into the trolley, and you pay with the trolley still full. The packing happens afterwards, at a long ledge that runs under the front window, at about waist height, out of everybody’s way. The shelf is where packing went when the shop took it out of the queue. Nobody is waiting behind you there.
The first thing most people do at the shelf is not pack. They read the receipt. At the till there was no time to look at it. Here it gets held up to the light and checked line by line, and now and then someone walks back to the till with it. Then they look at the shopping. It is the first time they have seen all of it at once. In the trolley it was a heap, and on the belt it was a line going past. On the shelf it is laid out flat, every item visible, and the heavy-first rule from the till can finally be followed. The tins go in first and the bread goes on top.
That part turns out to be easy, and the shelf shows what was hard all along: the bags. At a staffed till you find out how many bags you need one at a time, as each one fills. At the shelf you find out all at once, looking at the whole shop and the three bags you brought. Some of these shops put their emptied delivery boxes out for customers, and a box is the shelf’s answer to a miscount. The shelf also brings in a second rule that the till never had time for. The bag has to be carried. Two bags of about the same weight are easier to carry than one heavy one and one light one, so the people who walk home spend their minutes at the shelf moving tins between bags until the two hang evenly. The people who drive don’t bother. Their bags only have to get as far as the boot.
The shelf is also the only part of the shop where strangers stand side by side. In the queue everyone faces the same back. At the shelf you work shoulder to shoulder with someone else’s eggs, and there is no divider bar to say where your stretch ends. People mark it with the trolley, parked at an angle behind them, and with a little gap they leave on the ledge. Nobody looks at anyone else’s shopping, though it is all laid out in full view.
Then there is what gets left. By late afternoon the shelf holds receipts, a flattened box, a single banana that broke off a bunch, a bag someone meant to take. The reason is something the shelf doesn’t do. Everything else in the shop tells you when you’re done. The till beeps, the screen shows the total, the card machine says approved. The shelf says nothing. Nobody calls the next customer forward, because there is no next customer. You look at the bags, decide that will do, and push the trolley out. Anything you hadn’t noticed stays on the shelf.
It is the only place in the shop where you are finished when you say so, and the shelf is covered in proof of how often people say it early.