“Hi, how are you today?”
“Did you find everything you were looking for?”
“Paper or plastic?”
“You saved 9.68! Have a great day and see you soon!”
I have worked at a grocery store for two years now. Two years of BOGO sales, tons of plastic bags and lots of trips outside in the scorching heat to get rounds of grocery carts. Also, two years of smiling customers, learning opportunities, and creating lifelong friendships. My experience at my grocery store has been amazing, but the greatest lesson I have learned from working in customer service is the lesson of grace. Here’s how I found grace in a grocery store.
I work at one of the best companies. We pride ourselves on customer service and providing a great shopping experience for all of our customers. We take extra time to make sure people know we genuinely value them, not only because they are our customers, but we care about them as people too. We love to have conversations and make connections with our shoppers. We love greeting people’s children with a high five or a sticker and seeing people smile as we tell them they saved even more than they spent. I love hearing stories when I take people out to unload groceries in their car.
It’s not always coupons and laughs though. My job is tough, not in a way that is physically demanding, but spiritually tiring. This is a place where I get eye rolls because I have to send people to customer service to break their big bills. I get scowled at for not being able to control the prices of groceries week by week. Nasty comments about expired coupons. Here is where I am constantly degraded as a woman when I have to bring carts inside. I have been called incompetent, stupid and have been accused of not caring about the customers. The culture my store has created is one where the associates are easily taken advantage of. Our policy is to be nice, the customer is ALWAYS right. “Well, aren’t you going to ask me if I found everything okay?” or “Man, you didn’t even ask me if I needed help out with my groceries. “These are comments I receive too often.
Let me tell you something about everyone I work with. We are people too, we are HUMAN. Just because we work for a company doesn’t make us perfect. We are not master sales associates. We make errors, we ring up the wrong item, sometimes prices are wrong, when its busy our lines get backed up, sometimes we don’t have enough baggers so I am a little slower because I have to ring and bag your groceries by myself. We drop things, our registers get messy, sometimes we are at the tail end of our 11-hour shift and are just BEAT, and sometimes it feels like people just don’t understand that.
What I am learning is that it’s okay.
It’s okay that people only see me for my slow counting skills. It’s okay that people get mad at me when their chicken is the wrong price. It’s okay people think I am incompetent for not understanding exactly how they wanted their groceries bagged. It’s okay because I know these actions do not define me as a human. My identity is found in Christ and not in other people’s thoughts.
Here’s where grace comes in.
Every part of me wants to roll my eyes back at people. Make snide comments under my breath when people don’t even give me the time of day. I want to just sit with a pout on my face and ram the carts straight into peoples’ cars when they refuse to put them in the cart corral. I get frustrated, I get tired and I get irritable.
Then I remember grace. By grace, my life was SAVED and my heart was restored. Jesus paid the price for my sins, and my eye rolls, and my frustration with customers when they just can’t seem to say a single nice thing. Jesus provided that grace that has allowed me to be redeemed. He has made me whole and free.
Being a servant means dying to yourself. Dying to myself when I just want to scream because my heart is continually being beaten up. Dying to myself when I have to go out to the last parking spot in the parking lot to pick up a vacant electric cart. Dying to myself so I can somehow thank Jesus for dying for me first.
He paid that price so I wouldn’t have to, and he has commanded me two very seemingly simple things, love Him and love His people. Seemingly simple, but undeniably hard. I am trying, and I am growing and I am still learning. I am learning about how important grace is in everyday life. Grace for me is smiling through mean remarks. Grace is my deep breaths in to remain calm in the face of disrupted peace.
Grace is what Jesus gave me, and I will do everything I can to give it to all of his people.
I am still learning how to give it to myself, too.
“… but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in perfect weakness.’ Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.”
2 Corinthians 12:9
