The Brunch Table

A couple weeks ago, I read an article about a brawl in a Walmart that left a woman seriously injured. I didn’t pay much attention to it, or bother to wonder what caused the fight.

Then, today, in the Walmart serving Valencia, CA (and by extension, our landlocked school), I found myself an important clue. In the evenings, the human cashiers are now replaced by…a fleet of Self-Checkout machines. No longer are the machines limited to separate kiosks, where we may choose to conduct our transactions. Nope, at sundown, the conveyor belts stop, the stool-less clerks’ areas go empty, and a talking touchscreen announces the new game in town:

“There is an unidentified obstruction in the bagging area. Please remove the obstruction from the bagging area.”

The machines speak with a male voice when upset, and a female voice when pleased:

Female: “Duracell D-cell four-pack, four-eighty-seven.”
Male: “Please remove the obstruction from the bagging area.”

The woman doing the obstructing was in her late twenties, wearing an oversized gray sweatshirt with a college name lettered in blue and mostly hidden in the folds. She was red-haired, and strikingly beautiful, although her face and one elbow bore faint traces of what looked like burn scars. She had been steadily offering up the barcodes, one at a time, of each item in a Sisyphean, two-shopping-cart’s-worth pile of pink Barbie gear (“Barbie’s Mini Cooper”). But after the machine complained, loudly, for the fifth time, her initial determination petered out into plain exhaustion.

The male voice again: “Please contact an associate for assistance.”

Then a mustached old man from further back in the line–now backing up well into the aisles behind us–walked over to her.

“It’s your bag, miss.”

“What?”

He stepped forward and removed one of her bulging blue plastic Walmart bags from the platform. “I guess your bag’s not supposed to be in the, uh, bagging area.”

“Thank you,” said the machine, in its female, positive-reinforcement voice.

And this was when a little girl in a pink-and-purple puffy jacket came running up to me. She had straight black hair down to her waist.

“Why’s it doing that?” she asked me point-blank.

I suddenly felt very tall.

“Why’s the machine so bad?

She was maybe five years old.

“Well, it’s horribly designed,” I say. “It doesn’t look like it’s working right, does it?”

(My grandmother used to say–talk to everyone the same. If, in her presence, you started talking in baby talk to a baby, or using small words with a senescent relative, she’d take you aside and very bluntly ask you to stop it.)

The little girl thinks for a minute. She’s standing on one foot.

“Why does it say the same thing over and over?”

“It’s got, like, a tape recorder inside, and–”

“What’s a tape recorder?”

I feel tall and old.

“A voice recording…a recorded voice.”

“Oh.”

“So it just responds when she pushes the buttons there. It’s automatic, it doesn’t actually understand what’s going on.”

She thinks again. She keeps her raised leg bent back with one arm, kind of like a stork. “It’s stupid,” she says finally.

“Yeah, exactly.”

“That’s my mom.”

“Oh.”

“I can stand on one leg.”

“I see.”

“And I don’t fall down.”

I give that one some thought. “I don’t know, you’ll probably fall down sooner or later.”

She giggles. “No I won’t.”

We wait together for a while. Her mom hasn’t been interrupted by the machine’s male voice for some time now, but she’s seething with anger regardless. She sees her daughter and me, standing more or less side-by-side in line, and glares at me. I don’t meet her eyes.

Then there’s a tug on my jacket.

“Can I steal some gum?”

“What?” I quickly look up to make sure her mother is still busy scanning.

She grins (a couple teeth are missing), and points to the candy rack. She does an exaggerated whisper: “The machine doesn’t know if I steal gum, right?”

I point up at the four-way-split-screen TV monitors bolted prominently around the checkout area.

“They’ve got cameras everywhere.”

“Oh.”

Now I do the stage whisper. “But there’s probably nobody watching them. It’s just for the, you know, the appearance of security.”

I think to myself, “You just said ‘appearance of security’ to a five-year-old.”

“I can stand on one leg.”

“Yeah, I saw that already.”

“But it’s better this time.”

She suddenly pivots and runs up to the blue-backlit credit-card swiper, grabs the little black stylus dangling from its tether, and begins jabbing it at the machine’s screen. Her mother snaps.

“Jenny, what the hell are you–stop it!”

Jenny slowly puts the stylus down. With perfect calm, she cranes her head up, looks into her mother’s eyes, and declares,

“This machine is bad and crazy.”

“Jenny, go wait out front.”

She turns and waves goodbye to me–I’ve got just enough time to realize that she’s chewing a piece of bubble gum. And then Jenny runs off.