SHIRLEY works on the tills at Tesco. She would like to eat salmon en croute but her husband has vetoed the idea because he thinks it looks too dry, or "too claggy" as he colourfully put it.
Her neighbour's children have a paddling pool of Olympic proportions which they splash about in from the crack of dawn until supper time. And her son breaks out into a cold sweat if he sucks a sherbet lemon.
I know all this, not because I am a stalker who monitors her every move (put that injunction away, Shirl), but because she and I usually have a bit of a
chin wag as I'm packing my groceries during my regular Tuesday jaunts to the
supermarket.
Shirley is one of the new breed of till workers who don't just sling your goods down the conveyor belt while carrying on a conversation with their
neighbour about their boyfriend's bad habits ("honestly Trace, he could burp
for Britain").
Instead she greets every customers with a smile, asks them if they need help and makes the whole tedious process a lot more enjoyable by chatting about something and nothing until the groceries are all packed away, the money has been paid and the customer is ready to scuttle like a crab back
to the car while hanging on to their wonky trolley.
This new breed of friendly super-market workers, most of whom appear to be 50 plus women, has been influenced to some degree by the American "have a nice day" merchants, but thankfully they have swapped some of the false saccharine sweetness of the US charm offensive for genuine warmth.
Unfortunately, however, this is not likely to be the last Americanisation to
hit our supermarkets, and the next might not be quite so easy to deal with.
Britain's first Wal-Mart opened last year among a sprawl of shed-like superstores in Bristol's Patchway district. It was just one store, but its arrival in this country changed the game completely.
Tesco and Asda soon announced reams of price cuts and, more recently,
revealed plans to bring prices down to American levels within 18 months. Good
news, you might think, because lower prices obviously equal more money in customers' pockets and less in the tills, but this might not be the only Wal-Mart tactic that British supermarkets are forced to follow to remain competitive.
Implacably anti-union, Wal-Mart, which has 3,000 US stores and annual sales
of £136 billion, has helped transform American retailing by showing how
profitable it can be to use part-time and temporary workers who are not entitled to benefits or to redundancy when they are let go. Its wages are well below the industry average, with many of its workers poor enough to qualify for the US equivalent of income support, and now it is being sued by employees for sex discrimination.
The suit, which could include an estimated 500,000 current and former
employees if it is given class-action status (making it the largest sex
discrimination suit ever filed), claims that women are systematically being
relegated to lower-paid jobs and denied advancement opportunities. Wal-Mart is the largest employer of women in America, 70 per cent of its 100
million customers are women, and it uses female celebrities to actively
market itself to women. And yet, if the claims of the law suit are to be
believed, it does not regard women as an important part of its multi-billion
dollar business.
It could be that the problem lies with the top brass, who are all - bar one -
male, and who have been accused of living in the past; in 1962 to be precise
when their first stores opened in small town America and equal opportunities
laws had yet to get a grip.
But now its employees are giving the firm a not-so-gentle reminder that it is
not 1962 any more and that women can no longer be regarded as second class
citizens in the workplace.
This might seem to have little relevance for till workers at York's Askham Bar Tesco, but if the Americanisation of our supermarkets continues, as it undoubtedly will, it can only be a matter of time before "having a nice day" will be a long distant memory for Shirl and the girls.
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