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