One till open

On a busy evening in a large supermarket in Sharjah, one till is open out of eleven.

The queue runs back past the frozen aisle. A man with a full trolley sighs loudly enough to be heard at the front. A woman with two items asks the cashier, a little sharply, whether anyone else is coming. The cashier does not look up. She is scanning as fast as her hands allow, and she has heard the question many times already tonight.

Every face in that queue is pointed at her, because she is the only person there to point at.

But she did not decide how many people would work this evening. She did not choose to leave the self-scan machines out of order for a week, or to send the only other trained cashier to stack shelves, or to run thin on the one night everyone in the area does their big shop. Someone made each of those calls, calmly, somewhere else, probably with reasons that added up to a small saving.

A cashier having a slow day is bad luck. Ten closed tills on the busiest night of the week is a decision. It just does not look like one from the queue, because the person who made it is not standing in it.

Shoppers mostly do not think in these terms. They remember that the supermarket made them wait and the woman at the till was cold. Over a few months, some of them start going somewhere else, and nobody connects it to that night.

She is not the mistake. She is simply where the shop's choice becomes visible.