Photo by pin add / by NCND 2.0 CC

Last week I had a mad craving for cookies. After fighting it for hours, I decided to just give in instead of obsessing about it. So I drove to the grocery store at ten o’clock at night, grabbed a box of Lofthouse cookies (with pink icing and sprinkles) and headed to the self-checkout lane. This is when it occurred to me that although the self-checkout lane has saved me hours of time I would have spent in longer, slower-moving lines, it’s also been bad for my waistline.

Before the self-checkout, a cashier had to scan all your items for you. I would always imagine the cashier was judging my purchases, silently snarking at my choices. It’s more likely that the cashier didn’t care how many bottles of soda I was purchasing, but was more fixated on the wall clock and how many more minutes were left in their shift. Still, the possibility that they were judging me always made me slightly uncomfortable.

The self-checkout machine does not [...]

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I placed a can of compressed air on the check-out lane counter at OfficeMax when the cashier asked me, “When’s your birthday?” I’ve gotten so used to the odd questions I am asked at cash registers that this hardly phased me at all. Fashion Bug always asks for my phone number and Radio Shack used to ask for so much personal information that I was surprised they didn’t take a blood sample before I bought my electronic thinga-ma-jiggies. Someday I will probably have to tell a teenage wage slave my favorite color and my pet’s name before I can buy the latest DVD.

I told the cashier my birthday as I pulled out my billfold to pay. I didn’t demand an explanation for being carded, but he offered one anyway. “It’s because of the compressed air.” This didn’t make any sense to me and I told him so. “Evidently, some people try to get high off of it.” Geez, wouldn’t it just be easier to find a pot dealer? Or to buy some lamps and set [...]

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