5 Things I like about being a cashier

I had a terrible day at work on Saturday. I just kept thinking, 'I hate my job. I hate being here.' I am basically a prostitute, pimping myself out for $7.50 an hour--which makes me a very cheap prostitute, which is even worse. It's not even like I'm not even a high price call girl. But, I'm an optimist...glass half full kind of girl so I decided that today's blog would focus on the positive. Here it is. 5 things I like about being a cashier. . .

1. Flexible hours-this is pretty self explanatory. It's nice to be able to tell my manager when I can work and when I can't. If I need to request off or if I am going out of town for a week, no problem (well, besides not getting paid). Compare this to working at a typical 9:00-5:00 office job where vacation time has to be planned out as far in advance as possible. Imagine that you are out of the office for a week on vacation. You will most likely come back to the office to find a stack of phone messages on your desk and tons of paperwork to catch up on. At a typical office job there are deadlines and e-mails and paperwork. At the grocery store when your shift is over, you punch out and your done. You don't take paperwork home with you. And at the grocery store if I am scheduled and something comes up at the last minute and it turns out I can't work there is generally someone looking to pick up some extra hours, so I just make a few phone calls and I can find someone to cover my shift. I have to say the hours have really allowed me to have a well-rounded schedule. Being at this job has given me time to write, do volunteer work, take care of things around the house and do the other things that need to get done.
2. The people--I really enjoy working with people and being around people. Everyone I work with is really nice (well almost everyone) and it's a relaxed place to work. In my opinion there are very few places where you could work with a kid from high school for a few hours (and talk about how he just got his drivers' license) and then a few hours later you are working with a woman talking about taking her grand kids to the park and then talking to a college student about midterms. The employees at grocery stores are of all backgrounds, ages, and educational levels so it's a really interesting mix of people. The customers who come into the grocery store are young, old, rich and poor and the cashier gets to interact with all of them. And 98% of the customers are really nice, too.
3. Reading magazines (for FREE!) at the checkout. I am addicted to entertainment magazines but they can be pretty expensive. Working nights things generally slow down at around 10:30 or 11:00 at night so I have the chance to read all the magazines at the checkout stand (which I am really not supposed to do, but I do it anyway). This is how I stay caught up on all my celebrity gossip. Now this may not seem like a big deal (and yes, I know you can go to any local library and flip through magazines there for free, too) but hey, it's something. . .
4. I am writing about 5 things I like about being a cashier and I have to admit I got stuck at 4. But I thought about it for a while and the number 4 thing I like about being a cashier is the food. I love food so working at a grocery store is the next best thing to working in a restaurant, getting to be around people cooking and preparing the food. At the store I get to see what new products we have coming in. . .like did you know that they have pickles that come in snack-sized containers now? Yum! There's a new snack in the snack aisle called granola bites that I had never seen before that looked sooo good. I also found root beer flavored ice cream topping next to the peanut butter and jelly and for just a minute I felt like Christopher Columbus stumbling across the new world. I never would have known there are apple cider doughnuts for fall if a customer hadn't come through the checkout line with them. There are new oatmeal cookies with butterscotch chips that sounds soooo good. These are all products that I may never have seen if I wasn't in the store working. Also, I get to know what the good sales are.
5. I like that being a cashier helps me keep things in perspective and put myself in someone else's shoes. It can be easy to get frustrated when you are a customer--I think working at a grocery store has taught me to take a deep breath and try to be a more patient, understanding customer (not that this always works). I think about when I'm working how a nice customer can make my day much more pleasant and that makes me try to be nicer when I am a customer. I think being here has taught me in some small way to be thankful for what I have.