Check-Out Lady

Monoprix, for those who don't know, if the Target of France.  It has clothes, paper goods, a pretty wide selection of groceries and food items, and toiletries.  In the French tradition of the marche, in which their is a different store for each of these items and even for subcategories within these items, this store is considered a sort of necessary evil: life doesn't allow for you to spend all day running errands from place to place to buy everything you need, but my Lord do the French wish it did.  Personally, for this reason, I love Monoprix.  As fun as the French marches can be on a leisurely Sunday afternoon, I really enjoy the occasional return to the space of buy-everything-you-need-right-here, a very American thought process.  I especially enjoy it because, even though the goal is the same, the set-up differs in some specific ways, which makes air-apparent certain differences between French and American culture.

But probably the thing I love most about Monoprix are the people who work there.  Most of them are immigrants, like me, who speak someone limited French.  One of my favorite experiences was buying cheese there from the man working the cheese wall (they have a cheese wall! See what I'm getting at here?) who, upon realizing I wasn't natively French and came from the Americas, became very excited.  I realized that he thought I was from south of the border somewhere and spoke Spanish, and he himself was a fairly recent immigrant from Spain and rather anxious to meet someone whom he could speak his native language with.  I was very sorry to disappoint him (I know no Spanish) especially because I could understand so acutely how desperate the desire can be to communicate with someone without having to translate.  But he took it in good stride and we ended up getting in a long conversation, in both of our broken French, about being an immigrant here and missing home.  I found this man was less the exception at Monoprix than the rule, and I really got to like hearing where various employees were from and how this place differed from their home.

But my favorite person, one who I rarely got into conversations with but always looked for, was a woman who looked to be in her late 40's, maybe even early 50's.  She was notably older than the average Monoprix employee.  She has no discernable foreign accent, and while I don't recall her exact name I do remember glancing at her nametag in curiosity and noting it was a typically French name.  She was of asian heritage, her long black hair pulled back in a headband and always wearing shimmering light blue eye shadow thickly applied.  She had the raspy, rich voice only produced from decades from smoking.  I only spoke to her when she rang up my purchases at the check-out line.  Her smile when she greeted you, while always the same, somehow always seemed genuine; when she rang things up and then placed them neatly into bags, she did so with the speed and precision that only comes from years of practice.  I found her fascinating.

Working in a grocery store is a sucky job, especially on Monoprix which, to Parisians, is a shit store.  And having worked sucky jobs before, I recognized her right away: the lifer.  Sucky jobs are typically filled by young people or new arrivals to the country who are just trying to put away some money for at most a few years while looking for something better.  They do a good job but have little investment in what they do beyond not getting fired.  A lifer, on the other hand, is a person for whom the sucky job is not a sucky job, but a career.  For whatever reason, they have decided to work there for the rest of their lives, not pursuing any other options and actively seeking to earn raises and greater benefits but not promotions.  There are a wide array of reasons someone becomes a lifer within a company, but no matter what it requires a special type of person to succeed at it.  You have to have a remarkable level of self-confidence and independence: you are surrounded all day by young people with big dreams and plans which they talk quite confidently about fulfilling, while you yourself have little to no ambitions to speak of.  You, as the senior member of the team, are obligated to train these young people, knowing that often within the span of months they will be replaced by someone else nearly identical to train, while you will still be here.  And you must find a way not just to make do, but to be happy with your choice, to like your job, to be friends with your obnoxious twenty-something co-workers.  I've met people who have done it, and people who have been trying to do it and clearly on their way to developping a drinking problem.  This woman always struck as someone who seemed to be doing it successfully.  I never really wanted to know her backstory; I preferred to let her remain a mystery to me.  This figure: the woman who seems to be getting by on her own in a dead-end situation, who wears a lot of make-up, who's nice even when people are jerks, is so familar in American culture that she's become a cliche.  But in France, especially in the Monoprix in the 16th arrondisement, Paris' upper-east side, she seems practically unheard of.  Already inside this place which seems an abomination in French culture (they even play bad American pop music a lot - I've sometimes shopped longer just to finish dancing to Hot and Cold or Bleeding Love) to find her here, a legitimate French person, a strong reminder that culture cannot overcome the daily problems of survival.

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