Measure of Happiness

I went to Aldi yesterday, on a Sunday, and it was so full that I had to circle round the parking lot twice just to find a parking spot. That is very unusual in this part of UK, if not everywhere in the UK. I went inside, picked up my items and went to the cashier. While I was loading the things up and the cashier was scanning them, the cashier asked how I was doing. It went something like this:

Cashier : Hi how you’re doing?
Me: Hi, you alright?
Cashier: Not too bad myself. How about you?
Me: I’m good too, thanks.

Short pause.
Cashier : What have you / what are you up to this weekend? (I didn’t quite get the question but I think it was this.
Me : I have some friends coming over. Nice weather and all.
Cashier : *Looks outside* To be honest it’s not so great this few days.
Me : Really? It could be worse.
Cashier : Yeah, yeah, it could be worse, like always.

Laugh, short pause.
Me : A bit busy today.
Cashier: It’s Sunday mate, it’s always busy. I wouldn’t come to buy anything on Sunday.
Me : Laugh nervously because I realised I am among the people who made it even busier. I pointed to a discounted strawberry punnet. This looks fine, why are they discounted?
Cashier : What? Oh we have lots of them, see the date is tomorrow. We just had 7 boxes this morning, and we’re going to have more this evening.

So that was roughly how the conversation went, ending with byes and well wishes. As you can see, the conversation was bi-direction, with both sides picking things up. And if you know me, I don’t normally do that, and I don’t know the guy, and never talked to him before but it was in the middle of rush hour and the busiest day of the week for Aldi, yet he still can strike up a conversation (and even look outside to check the weather!). I thought to myself, this a measure of happiness in a community/society. If a busy staff, in the lowest priced supermarket, on a busy time of the week, can happily talk to a customer, and the customer, who just packed loads of stuffs into his trolley, thinking of rushing home afterwards, and still able to happily talk to the cashier, then the level of happiness is high in the community.

Compare that to my experience buying stuff in London, where more often than not, that the cashier would either be curt, talking to other staffs, or even worse, lifelessly scanning the items before uttering one word syllables such as, “Bag?” or “Card?”. Compare that to my experience in Kuala Lumpur where I normally shopped during the weekend at Tesco and the cashier would normally not look at you. To be fair, I would also not be willing to chat too much because I have another 30 to 60 minutes drive back from doing the grocery afterwards.

To make my anecdotes complete, I remember going to buy groceries in Perlis, in the quiet town of Kangar and the cashier would sometimes comment on what I was buying 😂. Yes, a bit nosy I think, but the staffs there are normally light hearted and not so stressed.

I know these are all generalised observations and I myself had experienced the opposite, but I think in general these observations are applicable, and a good measure of happiness is how ‘chatty’ you are during grocery shopping. That might be a good enough hypothesis for a doctorate thesis, but it is good enough for me to satisfy my conscience that I have a good life and should be grateful to it.

Here’s to more chatty and happy years to you and everyone.

Thank you for reading.