Doug Champeau: The view from behind the cash register

I'm a gray-haired cashier at an east St. Paul store of a major Minneapolis-based national discount retailer. You know the one; it has a logo with red concentric circles. You, the Minnesota consumer, have an obligation this Christmas season. You must spend. With housing, energy and other sectors of the market uncertain, your retail spending is critical to the U.S. economy. The 6.5 percent state sales tax you pay on purchases sustains our prized Minnesota economic position. And when I put your Chinese-made toy or faux Christmas tree into a plastic bag manufactured in Thailand, know that your dollars are lifting economies globally. You are carrying enormous responsibility. Thus, as a cashier, I want to help make your harried shopping experience eventful and satisfying. But I want to remind you that near-minimum-wage cashiers are people, too, and have little capacity to persuade shareholders to lower markups on what you buy.

First, it's critical to understand that cashiers appear at the most vulnerable and sensitive moment of your shopping -- the disengagement of you and your money. The typical customer experiences a moment of distress and regret. Those with cash suffer the most. Seeing their paper currency reduced to coins in change elicits a tear. Those few who still pay with checks suffer less; they have deliberated their debt and accept it. But most customers prefer using credit or debit cards, almost oblivious or resigned to the cost. They swipe, sign and sigh. It's quick and numbing.

"I only came in for two things" is a typical response from those whose cart is filled to the brim.

At my St. Paul store, we cashiers are a diverse lot, appropriately representing the makeup of our area. We are Asian, African, black, white, young and old, gay, more women than men, and a Wisconsinite or two. One has an elderly mother to care for. One is recovering from a heart attack. Some have nose piercings. Another is wondering what college to apply to. One wonders about his auto-body work career. Another a divorce. And some, love.

Our bosses are fixers. When I accidentally overcharged a customer, one stepped in and performed lightning-fast voodoo on the till that not only credited the customer's Visa account for my malfeasance but also awarded her a trio of "I'm sorry this happened to you" credit slips good for $3 each off any next purchase.

The idea behind customer service, I have learned, is to leave the customer feeling that she bilked us.

Our customers are also diverse. Hmong, Somali, Latino, black, white and races so mixed they would boggle a census demographer. Many customers do not speak English but have spouses or children who do. All typically shop for immediate family concerns -- toilet paper, diapers, clothes, detergent. The Christmas gift-giving season seems baffling to many non-Christians, but all succumb to the point-of-purchase displays and add pop, gum or candy to their orders.

But in many cases, despite clearly posted prices, customers come to us with concerns we are not always prepared to respond to quickly or satisfactorily, especially during a mixed-merchandise Christmas season: "How much is this?" and "It said it was cheaper on the counter" and "I don't want this after all." The cashiers' lament is that they are press-ganged after the store closes to put hundreds of pieces of customer-second-thought merchandise back onto shelves.

But for marked clearance-priced merchandise, we cashiers have little idea how much an item costs until we scan it. We rely on the universal product code (those vertical bars on everything) and a scanner to scream the price to the cash register. And we rely on cash registers to tell us how much change to dispense.

Consumers forget that there is something called a sales tax. At our store, it adds 7 percent to everything one buys but clothes and food, and the tax is not reflected in the posted price. It sometimes causes consumer shock. I tried explaining to a 6-year-old boy why his 97-cent candy was actually $1.03 as he presented me with a pocket-crumpled $1 bill and a perplexed look. I reached into my pocket for the needed pennies, pondered telling him about Keynesian economics, then said "thank you" and "would you like a bag?"

Remember, too: A cashier's instinct is to bag. Once merchandise is dumped on a conveyer belt, we rapidly scan it and deposit it into thin plastic bags, then into a customers' cart. Our store-labeled bags come preformed, precut and by the millions, designed for rapid deployment off of steel arms. When done well, the process is choreography. I've done pirouettes hand-scanning a 40-pound sack of cat litter and rebounding to dehangar, scan and bag a wireless bra.

It can be deflating to say you don't need a bag after such a Gene Kelly effort.

Finally, a cashier's most important role is not to sell you merchandise, but to sell you the means to buy more merchandise. Our cash register software is designed -- based on how much a customer is spending and how she pays -- to prompt the cashier to ask if she would like to apply for a store credit card. Credit drives economic growth.

Few apply; fewer are approved. But many can save mightily on a purchase by doing so. For a cashier, successfully completing a credit application is a high accomplishment, gathering praise and sometimes reward. With many Christmas purchases easily topping hundreds of dollars, you, too, will be asked.

This year, say "yes" and apply. It's not only good for our nation's economic growth, our global economy, our state revenues, but it's also good for Doug.

Doug Champeau is a cashier and writer from St. Paul.