Three trips to the supermarket

When you pop to the store, who’s the enemy?

I did a wee search and immediately found exactly what I had in my mind’s eye. It’s a scene from the 1983 movie Terms of Endearment, in the supermarket, in which Emma finds she’s a few dollars short for paying for her groceries. It’s a situation we’ve all been in at some time. But this scene is long and drawn out—embarrassingly so. Emma (Debra Winger) must be wanting the earth to open up and swallow her. And that’s probably what the couple immediately behind her in the queue would like as well. All at once a knight in shining armour appears in the form of Sam, the bank manager (John Lithgow). He tells her he’ll pay the difference for her. Then he does something extraordinary that none of us could ever do these days: he turns on the cashier and reprimands her for her rudeness. In 1983, that is something you could do. But not now. Why?

Maybe it’s because cashiers are less rude these days (or don’t come from New York). Sam’s exchange with her is carefully tailored: he says he knows the manager, but not as a bank customer, rather as a fellow member of Rotary: his “I know your boss” is directed via charitable channels, and not business ones. All in all, it’s a heartwarming scene but I must return to my question: why can’t you criticise the cashier nowadays?

Well, you can; in a small, independent store, provided you don’t plan on returning there. But not in a vast industrial outfit: there, that is not a cashier you see before you; it is a corporate representative, and it has the might of the corporate entity behind it, including its security detail. Criticise its rep, and you criticise it. Before I move on to the point, let me give you a second clip. It’s Fried Green Tomatoes and another supermarket scene, with Kathy Bates as Evelyn Couch and Kathy Larson and Missy Wolff as the two Beetle girls. Just watch it for now. The point is coming.

Here’s one last clip. It’s of a theatrical performance of the play Driving Miss Daisy. It’s the scene in which Hoke is driving Daisy to Piggly Wiggly, a supermarket. Take a look and then I’ll draw some conclusions.

The reason why you could challenge the rudeness of a check-out cashier in 1983 is because you were the customer and she was the person serving you. If you were around in 1983, you might not appreciate what I mean. If, like me, you were, then I would ask you to cast your mind back: back to when the customer is king meant that you could snub a shop assistant who failed to live up to a generally accepted standard of customer service. And now to ask yourself in how far that paradigm has changed. Because it has.

The reason why you cannot challenge the rudeness of a check-out cashier in 2026 is that you are the customer and she is the representative of the organisation that is serving you. She is not serving you; the organisation is. That’s the difference. In the Terms of Endearment clip from 1983, the characters of Emma and Sam unite, armed with Sam’s sharp humour, to form a bastion against the cashier. And, if what Sam says to her about Rotary is right, she has not only something to fear from Sam and Emma, i.e. their wrath, but also the wrath of her boss, once Sam has spoken to him.

The couple queueing behind Emma are interesting, if you even noticed them: they are us, the masses. They decide to simply cop out of the situation: they withdraw and go off to another check-out (where the people in front of them have enough money, no doubt). The subsequent altercation in the car park with Emma’s son (Troy Bishop) is an interesting subplot: Emma is unable to assert any authority over the cashier, because, not having enough money for her things, she has none to assert; but that which she has over Tommy she’s not going to let go for anything. After all, she paid for that, with a Mars bar.

The scene from Fried Green Tomatoes is genuinely funny. Yet it’s horrifying: whether we were in Bates’s car or the girls’ car, we’d be mortified at the idea of taking such direct vengeance against someone who’d merely pinched our parking spot. You can search on YouTube for these “karma” videos, where some naughty person gets their comeuppance, but they’re enjoyable; at a distance, that is: we would neither want to be the one being taught a lesson, nor really the one having to teach it. I think most of us would want to be that couple in Terms of Endearment, slinking off to another check-out.

Driving Miss Daisy is the antithesis of the final part of the scene in Terms of Endearment between Emma and Tommy. Instead of Emma reinforcing her authority over Tommy, Hoke has to assert his authority over Daisy in a round-about manner. Daisy is the authoritarian who can only be persuaded of her fault with difficulty, and long, hard patience.

The difference between challenging a cashier in 1983 and doing it in 2026 is illustrative of the path we have trodden in the intervening years. Because what none of these three clips brings to evidence is the true war we have been waging over the period covered. The fight is not with a cashier, in which customers unite for their cause, enrobed in empathy and mutual support, (aside from those who want no part in the drama). Nor is the fight one for a paltry chocolate bar, which forms a banal object of negotiation with a recalcitrant child, who himself is learning to assert authority against anyone he can find to assert it. Nor is the fight one for a supermarket parking spot, one in which we are at no point challenged ourselves to wonder at why the supermarket must be visited by car, why the Bates character cannot imagine shopping by foot or bicycle; why her society has been so designed to create precisely the petty fight for parking space that is the fulcrum of the scene. And, finally, the fight is not between an authoritarian lady and her minion chauffeur to determine the optimum route to reach the grocery store. The fight instead lies in a completely different place, which no one even notices in any of these scenes, even though it is the obvious elephant in the room. The fight is with the store.

For as long as we bicker about waiting times in queues, or about the meanness of other drivers who pinch our parking bays, or about the unfairness of a mom who can’t stretch to a candy bar, or to the best way to get to Piggly Wiggly, the store itself will be happy. Happy that we argue and bicker and disagree amongst one another, about waiting times, and about routes, and about places to park. And, meanwhile, not one of us notices the inexorable rise in the prices for the goods that we’ve gone to the ruddy store to buy, or the crass manipulations practised upon us, first, to get us there and, then, to get us buying the crud they sell.

It’s not that different to playing football: concentrate on the point; unite behind the movement; identify the enemy. When that is done, nobody will give a hoot what route you drive to the Piggly Wiggly.