One
summer, when I was a grown man in my 30s, I worked as a cashier at Target. I
needed a job and my self-esteem was too limited for me to shoot for anything
more ambitious.
To
get a job at Target, you first take a quiz on a computer at the front of the
store. It’s easy to guess what they want you to answer.
Q.
What would you do if you suspected a co-worker of stealing?
A. I would report them to my superior immediately!
A. I would report them to my superior immediately!
I
didn’t have company loyalty to Target, just like I didn’t for Barnes &
Noble or Meijer, because it is ridiculous for a human being to feel loyalty to
a corporation. Corporations are an integral part of our world, and you can’t
avoid them, but it’s important to remember that, at the end of the day, they
are amoral monsters.
Being
a cashier is, more than anything, boring. You stand in one place and you do the
same thing over and over. You are a cog in the machine. And to make the machine
more efficient, they give you a speed score on your screen. I had very good
speed scores. The key thing is to cut out that annoying “small talk” with the
customer and get the items scanned as quickly as possible. My high point was
when I maintained a 100% successful speed rating for over 100 consecutive
transactions. My high speed scores made up for the fact that I never, ever
talked people into signing up for the Target credit card.
The
longer I worked as a cashier, the more I felt like I could see the outlines of
what Philip K. Dick called the Black Iron Prison, whose walls surround us
without us realizing it. Every day people came in, presumably to pick up
something they needed, and then showed up at my line with a pile of stuff, just
random stuff, not essential, and not particularly glamorous, just items that
must have caught their eye as they roamed around the store. Hey, these shoes
are on sale, and I needed some tape, and this little plastic pumpkin is only a
dollar . . . Especially on payday, people would come in and, not even splurge
and buy something exciting, but buy piles of junk.
I
can’t know what the customers were actually thinking, of course—I avoided small
talk—but I felt like I could see the desperation in their eyes. They knew that
something was missing, they felt some void inside, and the only way they knew
how to fill it was to go to Target and look for something, anything, to spend
money on, to buy as much junk as they could in an effort to numb the pain. I’m not
looking down on them; I’ve done the same thing plenty of times, particularly
with fast food and the internet.
Standing
there at Target, ringing people up, I started to think, what if this empty
consumerism isn’t just a toxic strain in our culture? What if our culture
itself is toxic, a virus that’s infecting and killing the world?
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