Checkout Counter Geek

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When was the last time you found yourself compelled to engage in conversation with a checkout counter clerk?

Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to do just that. Want to know why I held up the line behind me?

After emptying the contents from the trolley onto the conveyor belt and waiting for the customer ahead of me to complete the payment process, I noted a copy of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypta” had been left aside by the customer. She probably had thought it an overindulgence and as impulse buys go, she was probably correct.

But seeing this DVD got me thinking that as I had not yet seen this movie and being a fan of the movies Mel has directed, I found that I wanted to see it and while wrestling with my little demon sitting on my right shoulder saying buy it, versus the ‘let common sense prevail’ angel on my left, Mr Checkout Counter Geek started talking to me.

He was asking me if I’d seen the movie. I told him I had not but would get around (common sense was speaking at this time) to doing sometime in the future.

Checkout Counter Geek then launched into a wonderful display of his knowledge about movies. His enthusiasm revealed he was a movie geek and he started to tell me his reaction to the first time he saw the movie.

He ended his two minute checkout counter review with the words, “..and despite the brutality and shocking moral dilema of what we now call ethnic cleansing, there was humour in the movie”.

Those last 5 words stopped me dead in my tracks. Here was a guy we all take for granted as being an underachiever (reference my post below), but able to offer a complete stranger at a checkout a peek into his incredibly knowledgable world about movies and relate all this to our society as we live it today.

Had we been anywhere else other than at a supermarket checkout, he would have had the floor for an hour non-stop. He was engaging, he was animated, he was humerous, his tonality was great - he knew how to converse about his specialist subject without boring the pants of me, he oozed enthusiasm.

It was a great couple of minutes in an otherwise mundane Saturday for him. Mr Checkout Counter Geek enlightened the rest of my day. And yes I did buy the movie. So do not tell me that all staff at a company are not marketers. My checkout guy will prove you so wrong.

Checkout Counter Geek