Bags

what it's like shopping at trader joe's instead of kroger

The title of this essay is a Clairo homage.

“What is the youngster saying to them? His wretched complexion makes him unhappy? He wants to leave school and work fulltime at Foodland, bagging groceries? He tells them he likes to bag groceries. It is the one thing in life he finds satisfying. Put the gallon jugs in first, square off the six-packs, double-bag the heavy merch. He does it well, he has the knack, he sees the items arranged in the bag before he touches a thing. It’s like Zen, gramma. I snap out two bigs, fit one inside the other. Don’t bruise the fruit, watch the eggs, put the ice cream in a freezer bag. A thousand people pass me every day but no one ever sees me. I like it, gramma, it’s totally unthreatening, it’s how I want to spend my life.”

-White Noise, Don Delillo

My second job was a bagger at Kroger in my midwest hometown, for three months in summer 2016. I was an infrequently published Hearthstone listicle writer before that. On November 7th 2022 I tweeted “mildly autistic white tall boys in the midwest are mandated to serve as baggers at kroger once in our lives, it's our version of military conscription” because that’s how I’ve felt whenever I return to Kroger since my tour of duty. I feel the same pride that old construction workers feel returning to a building that they helped lay bricks for, the same belonging-from-contribution of a retired professor returning to a college they taught for.

Kroger scheduled me for irregular shifts four or five a week, diligently avoiding a full forty hours so they didn’t have to give me any benefits. I surrendered myself to the requests of the bureaucracy and showed up on-time every time. My coworkers, who felt united with me in battle against the bureaucracy, taught me how to work the system. If I clocked in for my fifteen minute break at 5:08pm the system would round it up to 5:15pm, and if I clocked out of my fifteen minute break at 5:37pm the system would round it down to 5:30, so I could get a twenty-nine minute break for the price of fifteen. I loved the idea, but for me the fear of the truth being discovered by the Kroger middle management enforcers outweighed the relief of an extra fourteen minutes. And I didn’t dislike the job that much.

I loved the Tetris of bagging groceries, what Delillo talks about. It’s not a very hard game, and very rarely will anyone think about how their groceries were bagged, but when I stood at the end of the conveyor belt I felt responsibility to the artistry of it, to make sure that the groceries were optimally unloadable by my customers when they got home, even though that art would disappear in the moment that it was observed.

My favorite part of the job was when they’d send me outside on cart duty. Every fifteen minutes or so a bagger put on a yellow vest and went outside to bring in the carts that customers leave in the corrals. Other baggers didn’t like going out in the summer heat so I often volunteered to do it for them. The bureaucracy supplied a hook tool to safely chain together a ton of carts and bring them in, but it took a long time to tie the carts together, so I did it raw and pushed the carts by hand. Some of my coworkers used the hook tool when they wanted to be outside longer. As I built strength throughout the summer I could push chains of about eight carts in without the tool. I would run around the parking lot pushing the chains of carts uphill back to the store. And I did run, even though there was no reason to. Something about the flat pavement of parking lots just makes me want to run. Once I got more established at Kroger they often had me as the last bagger of the evening before the store closed. I would collect every single shopping cart from the parking lot as the air cooled during the late summer sunsets. Sometimes the yellow vest felt like a cape that imbued me with royal purpose.

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Since the pandemic Kroger has decreased bagging and cashier staff, always as a cost-cutting measure but at first under the guise of safety with the potential of their later return. My Kroger now often only has one bagger and cashier, with heavy encouragement to use self-checkouts. One time I came in early on a weekend morning, and there were no baggers and cashiers at all. An old man slammed his cart into a wall when he was asked to use the self-checkout. I wouldn’t want to scan and bag groceries at age eighty either, but if he’s not able to prove the financial value of having his groceries bagged to the Kroger CFO, what can be done? The market cleans up every corner, even if it’s a bit slow sometimes.

I’m shopping at Trader Joe’s in New York City now, which is different. There’s so much space in the midwest so Kroger can take up as much physical room as it wants to display its groceries. Kroger is sprawling with plenty of room in the aisles, and doesn’t care how long customers take to get through it. Trader Joe’s is restricted by New York City real estate prices, so the layout has to be tight and efficient. And so many shoppers go through the tight and efficient layout that the store has to be a well-oiled machine for speed, to get as many through its doors as possible. In Kroger I felt like I could be a leisurely as I wanted. I’d stop in the middle of the aisle to tweet at Kroger, partially because I could be leisurely but also because I felt at home there. But at Trader Joe’s I feel like I have to keep moving forward with the crowd.

Trader Joe’s in New York City has rows of twenty cashiers, who also bag groceries. The cashiers go faster than customers would at self-checkouts, and prevent theft, so it’s worth it to the bottom line to have them. And there’s so many other employees too: employees who tell customers which cash register to go to, employees who stand at the end of the checkout line with a big sign, employees who serve as crossing guards for the places where the line intersects with aisles. It’s busy and alive, and run far more like a military than Kroger ever was. Customers return their own cart though, because there’s no parking lot for the carts to sit alone in, and it’s not much work for them to bring it back on their own.

The food at Trader Joe’s different too. It’s younger, more coastal, exotic ingredients in chips, flavors of Kombucha I’ve never seen before. It’s more to my tastes, but it’s strange to have things more to my tastes so available to me.