The Weekend Before Christmas

    It was the weekend before Christmas and I was begging Mariana to give me Christmas Eve off. For the past couple of years that I have worked at Food Dynasty I usually get the day off. Yet, this year I lost the fight; but I do have Christmas day off so that made my shift all the more enjoyable.

   I have worked at Food Dynasty as a cashier for the past three and a half years. It is located on 50th street on Skillman Avenue in Woodside,Queens. Many young individuals like myself do not last there long because the job is a lot tougher than it appears. Anyone who has worked part-time at a grocery store or any kind of store knows what I am talking about.

   Food Dynasty hires people of all ages to work as cashiers or stock shelves. The other positions such as being a supervisor/manager and working in the downstairs office either require a degree or many years of experience.

   Prior to working at Food Dynasty I had been a baby-sitter as a teenager and unable to find real jobs because I was not 18 years of age. Yet when I turned 18 in 2007 I got a job at New York & Company as a sales associate and worked there for three months. In September of 2007 I began to work at Food Dynasty out of convenience; I started college and needed a job close to home.I thought it would be an easy job.

   The job is tedious at first because you must handle various types of transactions which include redeeming bottle refunds, processing W.I.C . checks(sometimes 5 at once), cashing personal checks for a purchase, gift cards, food stamp cards(there are sometimes special cases because there is EBT cash and EBT food amounts on one card), DEBIT/CREDIT,and regular cash transactions.

   In addition to doing those transactions sometimes customers will do part credit, part debit, part cash, and part check-the combinations for one monetary transcation would amaze as well as confuse an individual who is not use to conducting all those adverse transactions where pressing one wrong button can ruin everything (then you must start over).

   Plus, you must bag all of the customers’ groceries in a matter of seconds.There could be a group of five people purchasing a party-load worth of items (100 plus) and they will all watch as one cashier bags every item by themselves. Cashiers and other workers at dynasty have been deemed as slaves to the public, why else would they watch as a cashier bags 300 things when they have 10 people with them?

 Many of them consider you to be a amachine so they are not nice to you and usually tell you to hurry up when you are taking an extra 30 seconds-literally. One customer said , “the cashiers always rush us out the door.”

   At my store it is the customers that rush the cashier and throw their money at us, on the conveyor belt (while it is moving!) where the money gets stuck in the register half of time and give us dirty looks when we say “hello, how are you today?”

   Food Dynasty workers get this type of treatment all year round, yet it heightens around the holidays . More customers shop at supermarkets to get bargains  because they have sales on tons of items every week-especially on holiday/limited edition items like egg nog ice cream.

  This year and on the weekend before Christmas 2010 I have encountered many miserable and mean people. Starting with the rude customers that have complained for the past month how they hate Christmas music that my job has been playing.

   My photos above were taken on a friday night, on the weekend before Christmas which is why they do not appear hectic in spirit of the holiday season. The majority of customers in Woodside, Queens either shop at Stop & Shop by northern boulevard or Food Dynasty (for the most part) because they are the local supermarkets in the area. There are two other supermarkets owned by the Food Dynasty corporation on 46th and 61st Woodside (by different owners) yet they are not a pleasant hike in 20 degree weather.

   In spite of it all we all work as a team at Food Dynasty to make one anothers shift bearable. At times we all individually feel like giving up because are hard work is not appreciate by customers who underestimate our worth and intellect all because we work behind a register (with an unsightly store apron).

   The point of this project was not not go on a rant about how terrible my job is. I did this project in hopes of conveying whether through phototography or context what my co-workers and I endure on every single one of our shifts. Many people at my job and even in my family  have worked in the grocery business  for at least a decade and have encountered many walks of life; many stories were unpleasant. Many of my stories are unpleasant and I have only been working since I was 18 years old!

  As cashiers we have consistently been dehumanized by the public. Some customers do respect us and do strike up conversations with us. When they do they find that the majority of us attend college, lead respectable lives and are intelligent individuals. On the other side of the register it is easy to judge someone like me; yet you perceive me wrong because my humanity goes beyond what your acclaimed ‘double-vision’ can see.