To The Checkout Clerk at Walgreens Who Decided Not to Be Polite to the Asshole Customer

It’s Saturday and it’s raining. Only it just started and people weren’t ready for it. Customers dash into the store from the parking lot and give a little shake as they take a deep breath. They look up a bit wide-eyed. “Love Hurts” is playing on the store speakers.

 

Typically, all Walgreens stores are equally busy no matter the hour. The line for checkout should never be more than 4 people long. Maybe 5 if someone is buying Bud Light and one of the checkers is 17.

Tonight the line is 3 people long, but the guy in front of me is already angry enough to count as 2. You open up another register and say, “I can help the next person over here.”

The southern in me waits for Angry Guy to move over to the open register. He doesn’t. “Sir?” I say. Nothing. I have to actually walk in front of him and make eye contact, “Do you want to check out here?” I say, pointing to register 2.

“Yes I would!” he says in a way that implies he has been waiting for hours. He has bags from other stores in his hands.

“But I need a pack of Kools,” he says, looking at you suspiciously. Like maybe you won’t sell them. Like maybe his whole life he has asked for something as simple as a small pack of cigarettes and no one, NO ONE, ever gets them for him. 

You walk around the counter and come back with cigarettes.

 

He says to you in a slow, low voice, “Now, honey, I don’t know in what world ‘Camel’ sounds like ‘Kool,’ but I want Kools. Small blue box. BLUE BOX.”

He scowls, shakes his finger.

No amount of shit a person grew up with or crap that person has gone through in life, literally no amount of it, grants the right to be an asshole to strangers. No amount of years lived or times cheated on equal a free ticket on the Rude Bus that crashes through the windows of a stranger’s day when she is just trying to do her goddamn job.

You don’t apologize. Of course, you go back to the cigarette rack and yank a BLUE BOX off the shelf. You ring it up with his Coke and pills and don’t look at him. “$11.74” Normally, I can’t read minds, but clearly you are screaming, “Fuck you!” 

You maintained more composure than most could. Maybe more than you should have. Don’t second guess this. Tonight at dinner, I toast you, Walgreens Woman. Do not, do not ever, take that shit.