An interesting article came out of the Wall Street Journal recently about several cashiers who have turned their experiences ringing up customers' purchases into best-selling books.
In "99 Faces in One Day," supermarket cashier Carmela Narcisi, of Neuss, Germany, recalls when she told a customer the bananas he was purchasing were overripe.
"Don't worry about it," the man replied. "They're just for my mother-in-law."
Other stories include shoppers pulling money from their socks, strangers confiding about the death of a spouse and irate customers intent on qualifying for the express lane, the Journal reported.
Narcisi's goal was to make readers laugh and to hold up a mirror to some customers.
"People behave as if they are in their own living room," she told the newspaper. "Outsiders can't imagine what we cashiers have to go through sometimes."
Another cashier memoir by Anna Sam called "The Tribulations of a Cashier" became a best seller in France and Germany, and has sold 160,000 copies along with the rights for translations into 16 languages, according to the report, which cited the publisher.
And a German flower-shop employee penned "Customer Rage," while a U.S. cashier from Kansas published two slim books called "Letters From Your Friendly Cashier." In it, her sarcastic notes include titles such as: "To the lady who spent $104 on pet food," according to the report.
"I wrote them almost as a way to deal with these people," the author, Carrie Evans, told the Journal. "It's a funny way of self-therapy."
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