OCD at the Grocery Store

I'll admit to being a little anal retentive about the way I place my groceries on the check-out counter. I put heavy things up first (so they'll go back into the bottom of the cart after they've been bagged), cold things together (so they can be found easily and put away first at home), and toiletry items together (so I can carry them all in one bag to the bathroom). But if the cashier doesn't follow my system, I don't make a fuss about it.

Yesterday's cashier was well past anal retentive and clearly somewhere on the scale of obsessive compulsive disorder. I loved her!

She was adjusting her latex gloves as my items rolled toward her on the belt. She smiled and said, "It isn't that I don't want to touch your groceries; I don't want to touch anybody's." I smiled but didn't comment, and she continued: "People ask me all the time why I wear gloves, and I tell them the real question should be, 'Why doesn't everybody?'"

She looked over my items and began scanning them, one by one, but instead of placing the items in a bag, she set the first half dozen on top of the bag carousel. "Don't worry," she smiled. "I have a plan here." She set a couple more things up there, then picked up the next item, a rectangular-shaped one, larger than the first few, and put it in the bottom of a bag. Only then did she gather up the earlier items and place them strategically around the larger one in the bag. "We don't want those corners poking through the plastic," she explained, placing the now full plastic bag inside another one before handing it to me.

The rest of the process went much the same. Each package of raw meat was wrapped tightly in its own plastic bag to keep it separate from the pre-packaged sausage and lunchmeat that would go with it into another bag. As the cashier carefully placed my low-carb ice cream bars between two bags of pepperjack cheese cubes, she explained that she was separating the cheese bags to insulate the ice cream. The cashier held a small bag of dog treats in her hand for a few seconds while she visually scanned the remaining items for something similar, then, finding nothing, she shrugged her shoulders, smiled ruefully, and put it in the bag with the protein bars.

All my items were double-bagged except for some of the meats, which were triple-bagged, and everything was so organized that it took me only minutes to put it all away at home. Part of me understands that all these plastic bags aren't good for Mother Earth, but if that part is the least bit timid, the rest of me will try to get in this woman's check-out line the next time I go.