Saving the supermarket-queue culture

Saving the supermarket-queue culture

JAKARTA (JP): "Antri dong!" (Queue up!) is not the sort of
phrase one yearns to hear, it is, however, an oratory prompt that
my ears are abuzz to audibly perceive.

I discovered recently that along with the globalization of the
last decade, there is a specific genesis of a nouveau generation
of queue jumpers. A generation which believes that "who-jumps-
ahead-gets-ahead" and are a social menace to some passively mute
victims. Perhaps it is a result of raised stress levels or maybe
just a celestial conspiracy that has inadvertently attracted the
proverbial line jumpers toward some of us recently.

The one rare place you can see people religiously adhering to
the simple etiquette of forming a line is in movie theaters,
where the threatening presence of green-uniformed men means no
tickets if one is caught jumping the queue. While movie theaters
do not face this problem often, queue-jumping is grossly abundant
in Jakarta's supermarkets and stands out like a wart on the nose
in the mushrooming mega grocery stores of Jakarta.

I was beginning to believe that perhaps my perfunctory
etiquette was just not Indonesian enough. Was it being
antisocial, if one were to grudge the man who slips in front of
my stuffed cart with one item in hand at the supermarket check
out? Was it not required of him to even ask if he could pay for
his solitary purchase before I unloaded my cart?

As most supermarkets have a solitary weighing machine in the
"Fresh produce" department pushed against the wall, this is the
easiest place where one sees the supermarket-queue culture at its
worst. People are left tottering on their toes behind the
attendant, in a sort of tap dance to get their fresh produce
weighed. Since the attendant's back is up front there, shoppers
are left to their own means of getting their unweighed bags onto
the metal tray first. Carrefour has constructed a wonderful oval
sort of table with three weighing scales -- it would be nice if
they had an attendant behind each one of them -- and aisle ropes
to restrain queue jumpers, too.

Very often, the attendant who is going to grant me the visa
for proceeding to the cashier is missing-in-action and has to be
fetched first. Invariably as I return triumphantly with attendant
in tow, there is a bored looking customer with a bulging plastic
bag already balanced on the scales who has beaten me to it.

I cringe inwardly while the tails of my bean sprouts curl and
take their last breath. By the time all her plastic bags are
weighed, there is another interesting phenomenon slowly
materializing that never fails to amaze me. Slowly and silently,
like the courtiers of Julius Caesar, other entities brandishing
yet-to-be-weighed plastic bags zero in on all sides on "my
attendant". But this is no Ides of March and before someone
barges in and gives me a chance of exclaiming Et tu Brute, I
aggressively swing my stickerless bag onto the gleaming tray and
get my visa to exit the country of "fresh produce".

If only the attendant would take the initiative of maintaining
order and utter the pious words Tolong Antri! (queue up please),
life would be so much easier. No stress of pushing and shoving. I
would not be surprised if someday a survey were conducted and the
results say that 15 percent of heart attacks are triggered by the
fruit and vegetable-weighing counter of a supermarket.

I have heard people's supermarket sagas -- friends admitting
to committing ignominious acts of desperation in the fresh-
produce battlefield. Frustrated at the commotion, one said she
saw a packet of weighed and labeled vegetables discarded on the
carrots stand and triumphantly flipped it into her shopping cart.
That evening her family had to plow through one kilogram of lotus
stems at dinnertime. I have even heard of a desperate someone who
resorted to bribing another lady shopper for her weighed and
labeled packet of French beans.

But what is a regular supermarket shopper to do? Short of
pledging to stop eating fruits and vegetables that have to be
weighed, there seems to be no other solution other than declaring
war and getting the jump on the jumpers at nonexistent queues.
After all, "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

The supermarket-queue culture in our country is fast vanishing
and if we do nothing, it will soon be as extinct as dinosaurs. So
while Greenpeace volunteers save the bald eagle and the blue
whale, let us find a spot on the HI (Hotel Indonesia) roundabout
-- somewhere between the "Gus Dur turun" (Gus Dur step down) and
"Anti communist" demo banners and plant one that reads -- "Save
the supermarket queues".

--Pavan Kapoor