Seymour in the Kafka Checkout Lane

Ben "Seymour" Bottoms is a professor of Sociology at Cratchit State U. Yesterday he stopped at the Super Bunny IGA on his way home, to get some sparkling water, since his daughter is coming for the weekend. She likes anything that sparkles.

There were surprisingly few customers in the Super Bunny. Five checkout lanes were open, but only two were in use. A woman with bright red hair and two full carts was checking out on # 3. The clerks from 2, 4, and 5 were standing together at the end of # 3, pretending to bag the red-haired woman's groceries but actually trying to keep customers from realizing that their numbers were lighted. There was a young woman in the express lane, but she had only a container of large curd cottage cheese, so Ben knew she wouldn't take long. He stepped in behind her. That's when things went bad.

She wanted to pay for the cottage cheese with a credit card. It took a long time for her to find the card in her purse. Then she couldn't get it swiped correctly. It took her two tries to sign the electronic pad. Then she waited. So did the clerk, who wore a name tag that said she was Jennifer, except she was staring over at the other clerks, wishing she could join them, for by now, the red-haired woman was checked and bagged and out the door and clerk # 3 had joined the others for a discussion of when they would take their breaks. Finally Jennifer's brain returned to the express lane, where she noticed that the cottage cheese woman had failed to tap the "Accept" button on the credit card processor. She reminded her to do so. She did.

Normally Prof. Bottoms tries to take an academic approach to these incidents. It's field work and research, he tells himself. After all, his main areas of research are education and stupidity, and checkout lanes are a wonderful laboratory for at least one of those. This time he couldn't help himself.

"My God, what is wrong with you people?" he shouted to the entire store. "Don't you know that method of payment is what speeds or slows a checkout lane? It's not number of items. Look at lane # 3. That red-haired woman with the two full carts checked out faster than this woman with only cottage cheese. This isn't the Express lane. It's the Kafka lane."

"Well, you're the one who chose this lane," said Jennifer. "You should have seen that she was a large curd person. And my name's not Kafka."