Self-checkout lanes are a test of love

Want a great test for the strength of your marriage?

Try the self-checkout lanes at your favorite grocery store.

The do-it-yourself checkout option began for those with more confidence than items in their cart, for those stalwart customers who believed they could scan and pay faster on their own than by placing their trust in employees who run registers for a living.

Eventually, when both technology and customers proved capable (and when it became obvious that a UPC scanner, unlike an hourly employee, would never ask for bathroom breaks or cost-of-living increases), employers started replacing traditional checkouts with more DIY stations.

I generally avoid such lanes. If I have to wait in line a few more minutes for a traditional cashier, I rejoice. The break allows me to play on my phone (“Word Cookies” is my current BFF), see whatever Lady Gaga or the Kardashians are up to the covers of various tabloids, or just stare into space, tapping my foot to the elevator-muzak version of “Stairway to Heaven.”

My wife, however, believes differently.

This is where the marriage test comes into play.

She will ask, ever so sweetly, if I really want to wait in line, pointing to the sole open register among twenty-six lanes at our local Big Box Emporium, where an octogenarian customer methodically unloads a year’s worth of mac-and-cheese and Mucinex for the septuagenarian employee who drags each item slowly across the scanner, while somewhere in the distance a dog howls plaintively and grass grows in graveyards.

Wouldn’t it be ever-so-much better, my wife keens, if we used the self-checkout lane? We can be out long before we would even reach the conveyor belt in the traditional lane.

This is a dangerous offer. In the early days of self-checkouts, we naively sojourned there, but my wife’s just-take-charge attitude, coupled with my disdain for criticism, led to serious fights when she accused me of bagging too quickly and I accused her of scanning too slowly. We soon ended up with a cart half-filled with paid and unpaid items (and no idea which half was which) and a flashing light above the register, calling attention to the fact that we were, in fact, too stupid to self-pay.

But this was years ago. Now, we have brokered a certain measure of peace at the self-checkout, mostly because we have learned to specialize. Under our new, assembly-line system, my wife takes items out of the cart, I scan and bag them, and she puts the bags into a second cart, one which we procure solely for the purpose of maintaining our equanimity.

Still, though, I recognize this is a dangerous time for our marriage, and that I’m always just one can of peas or box of corn flakes away from a major meltdown.

So when she asks which line I prefer, I always counter with the same question: “How strong is our marriage today?”

Her answer is always the same: “I think we can do this. I’ll be good.”

I make no such promises, but I usually am. I’d like to believe I’ve matured in the same way DIY technology has.

Some couples go to expensive therapists. Others take part in trust-falls or play the gratitude game or go on long weekend retreats to reconnect. My wife and I just go to Walmart — save money, live better, strengthen your marriage. If that’s not the store’s motto, it should be.

Anyway, in a few years, we’ll be arguing about who has to pick up the groceries on the front porch after the drone has dropped them there.

Thanks to technology, this too shall pass.

This was originally published in The Alliance Review in May 2017. In the five years since, I have become more comfortable with self-checkout lines, to the point of preferring them over lines with a traditional cashier. Go figure. Also, the drone on the porch thing is closer to reality in some places, huh?