Ode to a Check out operator

With apologies, if necessary, to The Venerable Times I am herein reproducing [with attribution] a number of letters appearing in its Letters to the Editor section this week.

I missed the original correspondence, but it can be pieced together from this response under the title Blank Checkout:

Sir, Once again in your pages I find someone surprised that a "supermarket
checkout person" (letter, July 25) knows something - in this case that the
Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.

I am a "supermarket checkout person". I have a BA in anthropology and have
papers published in scientific journals. Most of my colleagues have degrees or
some qualifications that they are using or have used in their "real" carer,
except for the young people, most of whom are still at university, or are doing
their A levels in order to go to university (and I don't mean for media studies).
We know what happened in 1066 and a few other things.

We are not here because we are unqualified to do anything else. We are here
because we choose to be, for a few hours a week, because we have small children,
or elderly or disabled relatives who need our care, so we don't have time at the
moment to pursue our careers. Some of us work a couple of evenings a week as
well as having a "proper" job because we're paying school fees or trying to
lessen the financial burden of our children at university.

If you see one of us with a blank expression, it's not that we're not
thinking, it's that we're thinking of Anasazi trade routes, or string theory, or
modern Japanese cinema, or cabbages and kings. So would you mind not being so
patronising.

M Nutt
Bedford

Inevitably, this spirited defence of the country's army of put apon Supermarket Checkout Persons has elicited further support of its central contention which is that they are not all muppets. Two appeared in today's edition, under the heading Check this out and one of them supported the conntention:

Sir After I retired from teaching, I worked for a few hours as a
"supermarket checkout person" (letter, August 2). I, a mere MA, sat between a
chemist and a biologist, both PhDs.
Terry McIntee
Kendal, Cumbria

and

Sir, The checkout person with a BA in anthropology may well be thinking of
Anasazi trade routes, but I don't think the girl who served me was when she
looked quizzically at my cauliflower and asked me what it was.
P. Cragg
E Sussex

The truth lies somewhere within all this, a thread that could still have legs in it. We have at least one PhD amongst our hundred employees, and I suspect fewer than 1 in 100 of the general population has such a qualification.

Among the staff who are not still students there's an architect who took redundancy and uses his checkout earnings to supplement his slowly growing career as an exhibiting photographer.

One of our staff did law (but never practiced), another economics and history and joined us after being made redundant by one of the big name global accountancy firms. There's an IT graduate who can't get work and we've only just lost someone with a degree in criminology to the local constabulary after a two year wait to pursue her chosen career in the police. No doubt among the others there's a smattering of tertiary academic qualifications to be unearthed.

As to the cauliflower, well in my experience operators and other individuals who've never ventured into the kitchen except to take something out of the freezer and stick it in the the microwave wouldn't recognise a cauliflower if it sat up and started singing its name.

The plain fact is that all too many Brits are crappy cooks with only a passing acquaintaince with the raw ingredients that go into the finished products they eat. This will seem an outrageous assertion to the denizens of London's finer restaurants who not only know what a cauliflower is but can request it in French, in which language it does of course taste much better (and cost a whole lot more too).

Our kiddies are mostly students and mostly reasonably bright. One's reading mathematics at one of the better universities, others are students of economics, history, philosophy and other such heavy weight academic subjects.

Doesn't mean they wouldn't know the meaning of the word work. Doesn't mean they have a refined concept of customer service.

But they're not actually stupid. They'd just rather be students poring over their books and in what time is free hanging out with their mates before they get too old and have to worry about mortgages and insurance and council tax bills. Throughout most of human history we've gone out to work at or about the time we reached double figures in terms of our age. We then worked hard and pretty constantly. In the years since the second world war a generation and a half had the luxury of either learning a trade and securing a life-long income stream of lounging about at university for a few years before landing a well paid job that provide ample opportunities to look down upon and disparage those who hadn't pursued the academic route.

In the desperated determination of socialists to undermine the system that created the latter we've lost the lot. In forcing as near as possible absolutely everyone to stay in study of at least a quasi academic nature for as long as possible, we've lost the trained and trade practitioners. It is hardly possible to become qualified at anything without pursuing an academic course of one kind or another. The truth is a whole raft of people are not suited to such training and end up in untrained/unqualifed work of such low pay that state handouts are needed.

The knack of this government has been to up the level of support available, making it next to impossible that any recipient, without qualifications, training or prospects to reject the benefactor at the polls.

On the other hand academic qualifications have been so debased, in order to make them more widely accessible, that this country now struggles to create anyone with a credible academic portfolio. No smug middle classes, no solid self-supporting working class. And all sorts working behind the till at your local supermarket.