April 15, 2015 Article

The Old Coot checks out, checking out.

By Merlin Lessler

So there you are, in line at a grocery store, patiently waiting as your items get scanned into the cash register, Boing! Boing! Boing! one after the other; the UPC code is recognized and accepted by the mechanism that cashes you out. Every once in a while, an item won’t Boing. The clerk wipes off the bar code and tries again. That usually does it. If not, she quickly enters a long string of number from the package and goes to the next one. It takes just over a minute to check out 50 items. Still, we impatiently rock back and forth from one foot to the other, anxious to get our bags and get out the door.

How different this scene was a few decades back; each item had a price tag stuck to it, not a bar code. The cashier had to turn the item this way and that to find it, enter it into the cash register, while under the pressure of an eagle-eyed shopper checking her every move. Often saying, “Hey! You overcharged me on that can of corn; it was 36 cents; you rang up 63 cents. The adjustment was made on the next item; the math was done in the clerk’s head and explained to the eagle eyed shopper, “The ham is $3.96; I took off 27 cents to fix the overcharge for the corn.” Checking out 50 items took five minutes or more back then.  And, get this; the clerk had to figure out how much change to give the customer, all by herself. The cash register didn’t do it; she did it in her head. It was like this everyplace, not just grocery stores. School kids today would be hard pressed to figure out how much change to give someone who paid for a $16. 25 purchase with a 50-dollar bill. They can write a sentence about the mathematical manipulation and show four ways to arrive at an answer, but I doubt they could multiply, add and subtract in their heads like cashiers did before “smart” cash registers came along.

Going farther back in time, the check out process was even more tedious. The grocer would write the price of each item on a brown paper bag with a #2 pencil. He’d sum the column and come up with a total. Change was made in a drawer under the counter with slots for tens, fives and ones, and pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters and half-dollars. Most neighborhood grocery stores couldn’t afford a cash register. Payment was made in cash. No checks or credit cards back then, though many mom and pop operations ran a tab.

Next time you are in line behind five people with a cart full of groceries, multiply 5 minutes times each person to find out how long you’d be there in the good old days. (You can do that in your head can’t you?) If my old coot buddies did this, it might stop them from grousing about the high tech society we live. Sometimes a trip down memory lane makes you appreciate the present.