A Retired Athlete Wonders What Might Have Been

Stories like this one make me wonder if I would have been good enough to go to the championship:

In February, Scott Hall, a Price Cutter employee, will be in Las Vegas, competing for a $10,000 prize and a chance to appear on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”

His claim to fame? Bagging groceries.

Hall, a part-time cashier/bagger at the Price Cutter store at Grand Street and Chestnut Expressway, recently won the state championship in grocery bagging to advance to the national competition.

Cue the Bruce Springsteen.

I worked at a Shop Rite while I was at the university, and I was the best damned bagger that Shop Rite ever saw. I could keep up even with Trudy and Carolyn, the fastest checkers, even when they were going full speed. Back in those days, brother, the stores did not have a second conveyor belt or turntable to leisurely ride the product to the bagger; instead, the checkers flashed the UPCs past the scanner and whipped the groceries down to the bagger. You had to be fast, or Trudy could break your hand with a can of peas.

I could distribute the goods among bags, I could double bag or even senselessly put paper inside the plastic bags (some people thought that gave the plastic bags the strength of paper bags, but really, it just put four plastic-punching corners in the bag with the focused weight of all the contents). I could face the frozen and the dairy quickly. I could hear a checker call for a price check from all the way in the back of the store and round the corner to the checkouts before the courtesy counter person got her hands on the PA microphone. I walked so fast to handle those price checks that I beat a checker in a race once where she ran.

Ah, but the grocery store was a world of up or out, and I got promoted from bagger to checker to produce clerk. I stayed with it for four years, working between 20 and 50 hours a week and carrying a full college load between shifts (literally: some mornings I’d work 4-7, ride down to school on the bus, attend classes, and ride back to the store for a couple more hours in the afternoon). But even in my non-fulltime days, I was still the best bagger in the store, and even now I elbow the lackadaisical parttimers away from the end of the checkout lane when I’m grocery shopping. A number of stores now feature those conveyances that prevent one from honing one’s skills, but some of the older Price Cutters still have manual ends. I’d guess Hall’s Price Cutter is one of those.

Could I have been a state competitor, champion, and representative to the nationals? I’d like to think so. But the best part of reminiscing about What Might Have Been is the ongoing belief in maybe, and not simply remembering What Was Not.

UPDATE: As seen on Neatorama.

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3 thoughts on “A Retired Athlete Wonders What Might Have Been

  1. My retailing sport was pushing shopping carts back into the store. By the end, I could keep a string of 14 of them going. And I didn’t have any of those fancy bungee cords or motorized pushers that kids are using these days. I just had muscles and wits.

  2. 14 is an impressive number. I always found five to be the largest number for optimum cornering. It depends on your store setup, though. My first store had a foyer it shared with a Walgreen’s, which meant you had to come in the automatic door and make a 90 degree turn to get into the second automatic door. I don’t think it could have handled 14 carts.

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