Mean mode will make economic challenges worse

Recently, my husband and I hit different checkout lines at the store so we could surreptitiously buy valentines. He went to the speed checkout, while I headed for the self-service one.

Within a few minutes, I was done and stood waiting and watching and waiting some more. It was an oddly interesting, hard-to-decipher scene.

If you've ever been to a drive-in movie and glanced across at the other screens, that's what watching it was like. The clerk held up items and she and the woman in line ahead of my husband talked animatedly for a minute. She fiddled with the cash register for a bit, then shuffled things around again.

My husband stood there patiently, which is not typical. He chafes because I always seem to pick the slowest line, and while I'm in it, the cash register's apt to short out or at least run out of tape. You can count on the clerk having to leave at least twice to check prices. Yet, there I was, done — and getting increasingly antsy, anxious to get home and make dinner and get on with my evening.

I could tell a whole lot was not getting done, which irritates me. I just couldn't decide who was to blame for it. For some reason, fixing blame seemed pretty important.

Eventually, the woman was finished, her cart loaded with a handful of items that clearly should not have taken 10 minutes to ring up. She stepped aside but lingered. My husband moved up. But the clerk was ringing up diapers.

Great, I fumed. Now she's mixing up the orders. Stupid.

Then she handed the diapers to the woman, who loaded them, along with her young son, into the cart and, with another smile at those behind her, finally left.

"That was just really kind of sad," my husband told me a few minutes later. I had been watching a woman torn between food and diapers. And a clerk who was blatantly as impatient as I had felt standing there, although I could plead ignorance. She knew exactly what was going on.

The woman didn't have enough money for the meager set of items she wanted to buy. So they juggled things. She sent a small bag of tomatoes and some juice away but was trying to hang on to some chicken that was on sale. In the end, she asked the clerk to put the generic diapers away.

The clerk was scowling and waving the items around, clearly irritated and passively aggressively inviting everyone to witness the woman's humiliation. The customers in line, though, were as patient as I've ever seen a group of people, bless them.