http://women.timesonline.co.uk/tol/l...cle5853437.ece
The checkout girl: abused, ignored and on a till near you
The witty observations of a French checkout girl have become an international bestseller
Notice anything the last time you went to the supermarket? An irritatingly long queue, perhaps? Or a mispriced product? But what about the woman - it was almost certainly a woman - at the checkout, performing one of the most thankless tasks in modern society? Did you return her greeting or ignore her as you hurried to put away the debit card and pack the shopping? Few would blame you if you did. After all, how many of us bother to pay attention to the silent underclass scanning bar codes for low pay and little thanks?
But soon we may have to because the checkout girls of Europe have found a figurehead. Her name is Anna Sam and she worked in a French supermarket for almost a decade, smiling at shoppers but receiving little besides insults and disdain in return. She witnessed behaviour ranging from the loathsome to the lustful - queue-jumping, cheating, thieving, moaning and sometimes a quick fondle between the meat and the cheese counter.
She put up with self-important managers watching the staff from behind a one-way mirror, a salary of €680 (£605) a month and the orange polyester jacket that she had to wear. She would often joke with other checkout girls that someone should write a book about their plight.
Last summer, Sam did. Les Tribulations d'une Caissière (The Tribulations of a Checkout Girl) proved a monumental success and has been reprinted 19 times in France, where it has sold 100,000 copies. The film rights have been acquired, a musical comedy based on it is planned and a comic-strip version is to appear this year.
Sam's status has been transformed. She used to be part of the modern lumpen proletariat - the untrained, disposable female supermarket workers who take your money while dreaming of a better life. Now she is the voice of the voiceless, and the witty observer of a place that seems to bring out the worst in us all.
She used to say “bonjour” 250 times a day; few shoppers bothered to reply. She squirmed on her swivel chair waiting for authorisation to go to the toilet; managers kept her waiting. She greeted families at her till; parents frowned and warned their children: “If you don't work hard at school, you'll end up like that lady.” Her account has struck a chord not only in France but across Europe and beyond. Her book has been translated into ten languages, although not yet English. The day before we met she had been filmed for Austrian television. A German TV crew was due the following week. A few days earlier she had returned from Italy, where she had been interviewed by 25 newspapers, seven television and seven radio stations.
“I'd like to think that I could help to change the way people look at checkout workers,” she says, standing outside Leclerc hypermarket in Cleunay, near Rennes in Brittany, where she used to work. “It would be a start if they were just a little more polite to them.”
Anna Sam is a dark-haired 29-year-old who avoids make-up and describes herself as a garçon manqué - a tomboy. Down-to-earth and with a deadpan sense of humour, she is unfazed by success. She still lives in a small modern house on the outskirts of Rennes and drives an old black Fiat Punto that smells of her two shih-tzu dogs.
She has spent little of her new-found fortune on herself. “In fact, my only luxury is to buy whatever books I want,” she says. A Dan Brown paperback - “I can't remember the title. It's not The Da Vinci Code, anyway” - is the latest.
Richard, her husband, has benefited more. He was fed up with his job as an IT consultant on the French minimum wage of €8.71 (£7.73) an hour. “I told him that now we had a bit of money, it was time to learn to do something else.” He is training to become a plumber.
Sam spent five years at Rennes University, studying literature and specialising in Jean Ray, a Belgian author often described as the francophone Edgar Allen Poe. On graduating she was articulate, cultured and unable to find work in publishing, her chosen field. So she went back to Leclerc, where she had been working for 12 hours a week as a cashier to finance her studies. She asked to work a 24-hour week.
“I meant to spend six months or so in the job while I looked for something else,” she says. By her late twenties, she was still there. “There are an awful lot of people like me,” she says. “They have studied hard, got a degree and found that it leads to the jobs no one wants.” It is a problem throughout Europe, but is particularly acute in France. Here, 63.4 per cent of young people leave school with a Baccalauréat, which gives them an automatic right to the course and university of their choice.
The result is great confusion. Take Rennes: a town with a population of 208,000, it has 54,000 students cramming into overcrowded lecture theatres to study subjects such as art history, sociology and psychology. “Something like 400 students graduate with literature degrees every year in Rennes and they pretty much all want to become teachers,” says Sam. “But there just aren't that many teaching jobs.” Some become postmen, others live off welfare benefit. Many - mainly women - join France's 170,000 checkout workers.
“Are you in prison?” a six-year-old girl, peering over the till, asked Sam one day.
Not quite. On Mondays Sam would work from 9am to 2.30pm with a 16-minute break. A typical Wednesday shift would be from 3pm to 8.45pm with a 17-minute break. On Saturdays she would work from 9am to 1pm and from 3.30pm to 9.15pm, with 12 minutes off in the morning and 17 minutes in the afternoon. She would scan up to 21,000 products a week, lift 800kg an hour and ask customers for their loyalty cards 200 times a day. At night the beeping of her till filled her dreams.
“There are a lot of health problems in this job - tendonitis, lumbago, that sort of thing. There is a lot of depression as well because you're completely ignored by everyone: by your managers and by the customers. After a while you become convinced that you're less than nothing.”
Other employees at Leclerc in Cleunay - a bright 1990s store with 36 checkouts and a product range from grated Emmenthal to flat-screen television sets - agree. “No one really pays attention to us at all,” says one, who briefly answers questions only after I have put away my pen and notepad, for fear of being seen by a controller behind the one-way mirror on the far side of the store. “We have no unions and no recognition. In fact, we're just numbers - it's exactly like Anna says.”
Our conversation is interrupted by an irate shopper wondering whether “there's anyone working at the till today”. He has been kept waiting for less than a minute.
In April 2007, Sam began to exorcise her frustrations in a blog - caissierenofutur.over-blog.com. She wrote about the bosses who criticised her for not smiling enough; about her biceps bulging under the weight of beer, soft drinks and mineral water; about the clientèle.
There were the shoppers who sneakily took 11 or 12 products to the ten-items-or-fewer express checkout; who left empty trolleys by the till to book a place at the front of the queue; who tried to get out with CDs hidden in their boxes of Camembert. Then there were those who arrived ten minutes after the store had closed; or who vented their anger on Sam because they thought - mistakenly - that she was overcharging them; or who ignored her as they marched past the till while talking on their mobile phones.
“People behave in a supermarket as though they were in their living room,” she says. “It's quite amazing.” Some customers unashamedly, in front of her, finished the sandwiches that they had taken off the shelves; others downed bottles of wine in a corner of the store. A few even managed to have sex in the aisles.
“You thought supermarkets were not the most aphrodisiac of places?” she says. “Wrong. You'd be surprised at the number of kisses stolen by the shelves.”
With a million visits to date, the blog has been a triumph - largely because it has provided an outlet for supermarket staff throughout France, who write in with tales that are sometimes poignant, sometimes funny.
Publishers became interested and one offered Sam €12,000 - the equivalent of almost 18 months' wages - to turn it into the book that has propelled her to stardom. Her opinion is now sought by politicians and business leaders. When the French Parliament debated Sunday opening, for instance, MPs called Sam to a press conference, where she explained why she was opposed to it. “The girls will end up working Saturdays and Sundays. In practice they won't have a choice, and they will never see their families,” she said.
When a German till manufacturer wanted to develop training courses for the people who would use its latest model, it brought her in as a consultant. She delivered a simple but revolutionary message: “Bosses tend to have no consideration for checkout workers at all. I say that they need to be recognised as members of a profession.”
The checkout girl: abused, ignored and on a till near you
The witty observations of a French checkout girl have become an international bestseller
Notice anything the last time you went to the supermarket? An irritatingly long queue, perhaps? Or a mispriced product? But what about the woman - it was almost certainly a woman - at the checkout, performing one of the most thankless tasks in modern society? Did you return her greeting or ignore her as you hurried to put away the debit card and pack the shopping? Few would blame you if you did. After all, how many of us bother to pay attention to the silent underclass scanning bar codes for low pay and little thanks?
But soon we may have to because the checkout girls of Europe have found a figurehead. Her name is Anna Sam and she worked in a French supermarket for almost a decade, smiling at shoppers but receiving little besides insults and disdain in return. She witnessed behaviour ranging from the loathsome to the lustful - queue-jumping, cheating, thieving, moaning and sometimes a quick fondle between the meat and the cheese counter.
She put up with self-important managers watching the staff from behind a one-way mirror, a salary of €680 (£605) a month and the orange polyester jacket that she had to wear. She would often joke with other checkout girls that someone should write a book about their plight.
Last summer, Sam did. Les Tribulations d'une Caissière (The Tribulations of a Checkout Girl) proved a monumental success and has been reprinted 19 times in France, where it has sold 100,000 copies. The film rights have been acquired, a musical comedy based on it is planned and a comic-strip version is to appear this year.
Sam's status has been transformed. She used to be part of the modern lumpen proletariat - the untrained, disposable female supermarket workers who take your money while dreaming of a better life. Now she is the voice of the voiceless, and the witty observer of a place that seems to bring out the worst in us all.
She used to say “bonjour” 250 times a day; few shoppers bothered to reply. She squirmed on her swivel chair waiting for authorisation to go to the toilet; managers kept her waiting. She greeted families at her till; parents frowned and warned their children: “If you don't work hard at school, you'll end up like that lady.” Her account has struck a chord not only in France but across Europe and beyond. Her book has been translated into ten languages, although not yet English. The day before we met she had been filmed for Austrian television. A German TV crew was due the following week. A few days earlier she had returned from Italy, where she had been interviewed by 25 newspapers, seven television and seven radio stations.
“I'd like to think that I could help to change the way people look at checkout workers,” she says, standing outside Leclerc hypermarket in Cleunay, near Rennes in Brittany, where she used to work. “It would be a start if they were just a little more polite to them.”
Anna Sam is a dark-haired 29-year-old who avoids make-up and describes herself as a garçon manqué - a tomboy. Down-to-earth and with a deadpan sense of humour, she is unfazed by success. She still lives in a small modern house on the outskirts of Rennes and drives an old black Fiat Punto that smells of her two shih-tzu dogs.
She has spent little of her new-found fortune on herself. “In fact, my only luxury is to buy whatever books I want,” she says. A Dan Brown paperback - “I can't remember the title. It's not The Da Vinci Code, anyway” - is the latest.
Richard, her husband, has benefited more. He was fed up with his job as an IT consultant on the French minimum wage of €8.71 (£7.73) an hour. “I told him that now we had a bit of money, it was time to learn to do something else.” He is training to become a plumber.
Sam spent five years at Rennes University, studying literature and specialising in Jean Ray, a Belgian author often described as the francophone Edgar Allen Poe. On graduating she was articulate, cultured and unable to find work in publishing, her chosen field. So she went back to Leclerc, where she had been working for 12 hours a week as a cashier to finance her studies. She asked to work a 24-hour week.
“I meant to spend six months or so in the job while I looked for something else,” she says. By her late twenties, she was still there. “There are an awful lot of people like me,” she says. “They have studied hard, got a degree and found that it leads to the jobs no one wants.” It is a problem throughout Europe, but is particularly acute in France. Here, 63.4 per cent of young people leave school with a Baccalauréat, which gives them an automatic right to the course and university of their choice.
The result is great confusion. Take Rennes: a town with a population of 208,000, it has 54,000 students cramming into overcrowded lecture theatres to study subjects such as art history, sociology and psychology. “Something like 400 students graduate with literature degrees every year in Rennes and they pretty much all want to become teachers,” says Sam. “But there just aren't that many teaching jobs.” Some become postmen, others live off welfare benefit. Many - mainly women - join France's 170,000 checkout workers.
“Are you in prison?” a six-year-old girl, peering over the till, asked Sam one day.
Not quite. On Mondays Sam would work from 9am to 2.30pm with a 16-minute break. A typical Wednesday shift would be from 3pm to 8.45pm with a 17-minute break. On Saturdays she would work from 9am to 1pm and from 3.30pm to 9.15pm, with 12 minutes off in the morning and 17 minutes in the afternoon. She would scan up to 21,000 products a week, lift 800kg an hour and ask customers for their loyalty cards 200 times a day. At night the beeping of her till filled her dreams.
“There are a lot of health problems in this job - tendonitis, lumbago, that sort of thing. There is a lot of depression as well because you're completely ignored by everyone: by your managers and by the customers. After a while you become convinced that you're less than nothing.”
Other employees at Leclerc in Cleunay - a bright 1990s store with 36 checkouts and a product range from grated Emmenthal to flat-screen television sets - agree. “No one really pays attention to us at all,” says one, who briefly answers questions only after I have put away my pen and notepad, for fear of being seen by a controller behind the one-way mirror on the far side of the store. “We have no unions and no recognition. In fact, we're just numbers - it's exactly like Anna says.”
Our conversation is interrupted by an irate shopper wondering whether “there's anyone working at the till today”. He has been kept waiting for less than a minute.
In April 2007, Sam began to exorcise her frustrations in a blog - caissierenofutur.over-blog.com. She wrote about the bosses who criticised her for not smiling enough; about her biceps bulging under the weight of beer, soft drinks and mineral water; about the clientèle.
There were the shoppers who sneakily took 11 or 12 products to the ten-items-or-fewer express checkout; who left empty trolleys by the till to book a place at the front of the queue; who tried to get out with CDs hidden in their boxes of Camembert. Then there were those who arrived ten minutes after the store had closed; or who vented their anger on Sam because they thought - mistakenly - that she was overcharging them; or who ignored her as they marched past the till while talking on their mobile phones.
“People behave in a supermarket as though they were in their living room,” she says. “It's quite amazing.” Some customers unashamedly, in front of her, finished the sandwiches that they had taken off the shelves; others downed bottles of wine in a corner of the store. A few even managed to have sex in the aisles.
“You thought supermarkets were not the most aphrodisiac of places?” she says. “Wrong. You'd be surprised at the number of kisses stolen by the shelves.”
With a million visits to date, the blog has been a triumph - largely because it has provided an outlet for supermarket staff throughout France, who write in with tales that are sometimes poignant, sometimes funny.
Publishers became interested and one offered Sam €12,000 - the equivalent of almost 18 months' wages - to turn it into the book that has propelled her to stardom. Her opinion is now sought by politicians and business leaders. When the French Parliament debated Sunday opening, for instance, MPs called Sam to a press conference, where she explained why she was opposed to it. “The girls will end up working Saturdays and Sundays. In practice they won't have a choice, and they will never see their families,” she said.
When a German till manufacturer wanted to develop training courses for the people who would use its latest model, it brought her in as a consultant. She delivered a simple but revolutionary message: “Bosses tend to have no consideration for checkout workers at all. I say that they need to be recognised as members of a profession.”
Its amazing the response you get when you do the most basic of things like treating someone else as a human being.
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