Harsh Toke: Jamal, the Incompetent Grocery Bagger at Rainbow Foods, Hub Shopping Center, Bloomington, MN

Hey, Jamal,

Listen. I know being a bagboy sucks. I can't imagine that I'd like it, either. Hour after hour of cramming people's crap in bags without a break would be hard to handle, no question. But you know what, Jamal? You're getting paid to do a job. And there's a right way to do this job. And the right way to bag groceries sure as fuck doesn't involve cramming 30 pounds of food into one bag, with all of the cans on top for extra crushing and bag-ripping action.

A crap job, you say? Listen, pal. When I was around your age, I spent a summer cleaning toilets at a nuclear power plant. I know from crap jobs. But, even on Taco Night, I cleaned the toilets properly, because I was getting paid for it. No one's asking you to spend eight hours in a nuclear facility without a radiation monitor; all we want is for you to keep from piling things so that the heavy stuff causes the fucking yogurt to rupture and slime up the bottom of the bag. OK?

A hundred bucks' worth of food shouldn't fit into three bags. If you see that happening, it means that food's compressing, and that's not a good thing. I like my chips full-sized, not powdered. I don't like my bananas to be load-bearing fruit. When buying bread, my goal isn't to minimize the volume it occupies.

To put it another way: I'm as much of an environmentalist as the next guy, but I don't think that saving a couple of grocery bags is doing anyone much of a favor, especially at the expense of all the shit you smashed.

You won't be a grocery boy forever, Jamal. It's clear that you're going places. You didn't have the dead, glassy eyes that the other baggers at Rainbow, the lifers, had. You'll move on to bigger and better things, just like I got out of the radioactive toilet game. But right now, you have the rare distinction of being totally incompetent at an easy job. Even the guy in the crash helmet's a better bagger than you, my friend.
--Keith Pille