Short Story: Pensioner Zero

Hey all, this post is a quick revisit back to a short story I wrote a while ago. For a little background, I wrote this while I was working for Aldi while I was looking for a professional job in Canberra. I may or may not have been bitter and cynical at the time of writing. Enjoy!

Pensioner Zero

Like zombies they gather, in the early morning - haunting carparks with Zimmer frames and canes. Crowding around the clinical tempered glass of the protective electronic double sliding doors that separate us. Waiting for the signal to be given, waiting for the mechanism to unlock, waiting to seep through the crystalline barriers to shuffle idly, mindlessly back and forth through the aisles.

From behind the cage they exertedly push, like Sisyphus rolling the stone, they peruse this week's specials at a lurching amble.

"My gosh, that's cheap." they remark regarding some low-quality, built-to-a-price-by-the-lowest-bidder, piece of consumer electronics, before registering a complaint about the lacklustre workmanship.

"They just don't make 'em like they used to," they croak to each other in raspy tones, "everything is made in bloody China now". They express their myopic perspective; vision which cannot be improved in clarity with the best of lenses, served with a side of borderline racist undertones.

Shovelling canned goods and other flotsam and jetsam into their metallic nets, they march inevitably toward the counter. They unload their items onto the belt at a painfully slow pace; a speed that makes human evolution look as though it happened overnight. The red second hand clicks loudly. Much to the annoyance of the cashier, it runs a full revolution. Then another. And another. 

Their backs are weak, their knees stiff, their bones brittle. They just don't make 'em like they used to. They exhaustedly jostle the wheeled basket into the receiving position, an elegant manoeuvre in the supermarket leagues. They nod, as if in slow motion, toward the cashier indicating their readiness to make the play.

Without hesitation, the cashier proceeds to fire items past the scanner, only breaking to demonstrate a level of dexterity unseen by their generation. Groceries pile up faster than a freeway in a blizzard with zero visibility. The scanner sounds in a chorus of rapid-fire bleeps. The elderly couple cannot abate the onslaught.

As if the experience was over before it began, the total amount gleans toward the couple in a dull green, dot-matrix font, the likes of which haven't been seen since the early nineties.

"Cheaper than I thought" they crow at each other. 

Turning their beaks toward the cashier, they proceed to dig through knitted cardigan pockets searching for their pension money. The second hand completes another lap. Like archaeologists they manage to unearth a wrinkled fifty dollar note, buried beneath a layer of glasses cases, used tissues and other debris. Instantaneously the cashier makes their change, and offers a polite but trite farewell, and turns to the growing line of other grumpy old bitties.

"Where are our bags? Aren't you going to pack these?"

Remnants of a dying epoch, fossilised by the inevitable march forward of productivity.