At the grocery store on Saturday the clerk was bagging the groceries, and doing a damned fine job. I admit I make it easy: I load the belt by category and destination. Everyone does, don’t they? It’s part of planning ahead. If I arrange the items so it’s meat / vegetables, then bladders of liquids, then dry food, then domestic goods, everything’s in bags that can be ferried to their property destination without rooting through a bag that has bacon, razors, socks, and cereal. She stocked the bags well, and respected the genre classifications I’d set up.
“Nice framing,” I said. That’s the term for bracing a bag so it has walls, and everything fits together.
“Thank you,” she said. “They don’t teach us.”
“They don’t?
“No, they show us a video on how it’s supposed to be done, but they don’t train anyone. Everything I learned I learned from Byerly’s.”
That’s the high-end grocery store. They have one person to run the belt and another to bag. Half the baggers are retirees, half 20-somethings. I don’t mean a hellish vivisectioned conjoining of the two. They’re all good, and I don’t just mean they don’t put coffee cans on top of grapes. They frame well. That’s the skill of grocery-store bagging: the ability to look at the items on the belt and see the frame.
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