A grocery bagger is an important part of many supermarkets. He or she can have a variety of jobs depending on store policy. Some people who work bagging, also stock shelves, for instance, while others will principally work with a cashier to get groceries in bags. Another thing many baggers do is assist customers exiting the store, and they may help customers load their cars with groceries.
Lots of teens and young adults take on positions as grocery baggers, and this might imply that this field of work doesn’t require that much skill. Good baggers will argue that skill is indeed needed. Placing things haphazardly in bags, overfilling them so they’ll rip, or leaving poor impressions on customers in other ways is a distinct problem. Essentially, any grocery bagger who wants to keep his job needs to be both fast and thoughtful, in order to keep customers happy.
While the bagger must work with speed, he must also work within certain guidelines. Some things these grocery store workers need to avoid include packing chemicals like cleaners with food, bagging raw meat with raw vegetables or fruit, and placing squishy, easily bruised items (such as bananas or tomatoes) underneath heavier items like canned food. Such behavior is likely to provoke complaints from people who may leave with damaged or unusable groceries. Some of the best baggers say they look at what’s being checked or rung up at the cash register so they can form a plan of how to place things together in the most ordered way.
A number of baggers also escort customers to their cars and help load up groceries. When this is part of a bagger’s job, he becomes the final representative of the store, and the last person in its employ that can make a good impression on a customer; this can matter. To be most successful in this, the bagger is polite, helpful, patient and willing to listen to the customer chatter on about anything. He or she cannot exclaim at the dirtiness of a trunk or the back of a van, but instead simply loads up the car as needed. In some areas, tipping baggers is common, so this form of politeness can prove not only helpful to the store but lucrative.
In many smaller stores a bagger could also move stock or stock shelves, or occasionally help people who do stock the store. This could occur during times when there is little store traffic and little need to bag groceries. The degree to which stocking is involved is highly dependent on individual stores. Sometimes baggers also participate in other things like cleaning spills or verifying prices.
