Whole Foods And The Legend Of Bagger Bitch

Scott Olson. Getty Images.

Trigger warning: I've written another blog about a personal experience. If you prefer blogs about impressive statistical performances in the NFL or the cleavage of a woman spotted behind the bench at a hockey game, there should be plenty. What follows here is nothing of the sort. It is an inconsequential moment from an unimpressive life. Get out while you can.  

Yesterday, this happened:

I stopped at Whole Foods for my weekly grocery sourcing. Lately, in an effort to rebalance my life, I've been cooking far more of my meals. I find it therapeutic until the smoke alarm goes off from air-frying plain broccoli florets. Then I want to start an actual fire to justify the blaring, malfunctioning chaos that injects panic into the otherwise peaceful atmosphere I'm trying to manifest. 

It's also nice because I'm saving a ton of money versus eating out (restaurants, not women) or ordering in (Seamless, not hookers). I then spend that money on expensive clothing in some rebellious counteraction to my efforts at balance. Clearly, whatever it is that I'm looking for, I'm yet to find. 

Now, I do something that some might deem… a little quirky at the grocery store. I do not put my produce in the small, clear plastic bags that come on that toilet paper roll—the super thin bags that wouldn't work to suffocate someone because your victim could easily poke their tongue through to create a blowhole. Instead, I lay my carrots, broccolini, lemons, apples, bananas, sweet potatoes, green onions, and brussels sprouts in my hand-drawn basket. Straight up, no protection, like I'm harvesting a garden with a wicker basket in Amish country. 

I can't remember when I stopped putting my stuff in the bags. At some point I realized it was a waste of time and plastic. Maybe the turtle thing played a factor. I saw a post once that showed how floating plastic bags look exactly like jellyfish, aka turtle food. I can imagine that thin produce bags are the most difficult to distinguish from jellyfish. Think about all the plastic bags you know, and imagine them billowing around a kelp forest. Produce bags have to be at the top of your jellyfish doppelganger list. 

When I arrived at the checkout counter, I began placing my items on the belt. Suddenly, an elderly woman behind me tapped me on the shoulder. She was holding two of the plastic produce bags. I do not understand why, or how, she had extras. 

"Will you put your items in these bags?" she asked. 

There are moments in life where a person must choose whether to give in or fight. Where a human interaction is so unthinkably weird, so extraordinary, that you struggle to compute the proper human response. I actually APOLOGIZED first and started to reach for the bags. 

But that's when my internal processor rebooted from its crash to start furiously writing lines of code in my brain. 

Why… why would I do that? Was I committing some unwritten grocery store foul by having my produce lay butt-naked on the belt? Was I unaware that the checkout belt, like the valve for a water fountain, contains more bacteria than a Wuhan wet market? If any of this were true, then how come no checkout clerk had ever mentioned it to me? 

No. Surely, there was no foul. This was simply the personal preference of a madwoman, hellbent on enforcing her will to satisfy her bloodlust for power. 

I grimaced: "Sorry… I don't want to do that." I was cold about it, too. You guys would have been proud of me. 

"Some people don't like that," she replied, sensing that she'd underestimated her opponent and now might have to roll up her sleeves for the long fight coming. 

"I don't want to waste the plastic," I said, lobbing a passive-aggressive pot pie directly at her smug mug. For you see, I had now insinuated that she—a Whole Foodie likely possessing an environmental awareness that makes her proud to be doing her part—was fomenting a reptilian genocide* from which our beloved turtles might never recover. 

*Turtles are reptiles, not amphibians. I know; I didn't see it either. 

Some people don't like that. Bitch, it's you. Don't hide behind an invisible crowd. This is a one-on-one duel and you picked the wrong fucking guy. 

I continued loading my produce on the belt. I even thought about dragging it in circles to create as much surface contact as possible. But if I'm honest, I wasn't exactly thrilled by the idea. A man has his limits, and my poor broccolini bunches were looking AWFULLY exposed. 

All this time, the checkout clerk had been silently watching this unfold. The tiniest hint of a smirk seemed to tug at the corners of her lips, but that may be my own biased lenses coloring my perception. As I paid and collected my bags, I walked through the automatic doors more flustered than a flock of flamingos in Finland. 

Was I wrong? Was she wrong? I did what I often do in these situations and turned to the people for a ruling. As of this writing, my Instagram poll has been voted on by 6,556 people. 

93% took my side. In politics, they might call that a supermajority. That night, my dinner tasted extra delicious, thanks in no small part to the faint hint of rubber that seasoned the broccolini.