Isn't it a special thing to see the disabled and downtrodden get a break in life? In turn, how special is to wait long enough to die of natural causes in the supermarket checkout line only to find melons bagged atop your potato chips? My company's brain trust has deemed it necessary to employ slow and worthless baggers in the front end department.

All arrogance aside, the primary function of the bagger is to assist the cashier, the secondary function is to assist the customer. Some baggers can scarcely do neither, which comes at the expense of us all in order to line the company's pockets. Organizations receive annual handouts from the government in return for employing people who have been declared "disabled" or who have been on government assistance, such as Supplemental Social Security Income. The majority of the baggers I work with are afflicted by conditions such as Down's syndrome and mental retardation.

Discard political correctness, ease up on the heart strings and get serious. This preferential treatment and thinly disguised bribery does nothing but insult regular working people and bitch slap the sincerely unemployed. To be perfectly clear, some retarded baggers are quite competent and I respect their ability to be productive despite dramatic impedements. Others with similar conditions, however, are useless on the job and have no business collecting paychecks and should be fired in favor of applicants who are at least marginally qualified.
I have been a grocery store cashier for the past five months and been unemployed a few times.

On the job, I have seen people with far less to offer the company than the majority of the unemployed unskilled laborers in the Dallas area thrive and screw up with impunity. I could have only fantasized that such favoritism had been shown towards me when I was peniless and hopeless during a job hunt. Like many workers in this decade, I was repeatedly rejected for minimum wage gigs that are nothing but a punch line in Western societies. Unfortunately, supermarkets have few financial incentives to hire people with triple-digit IQ levels and basic language skills. I'll be damned if these charity cases had to pitch their song and dance to half the employers in town and sweat buckets in between bus rides as many of us have done in order to find work.

To illustrate the caliber of some baggers' skills, I'll tell you of a memorable day at work. As I opened up my register one afternoon, I was joined by a newly hired bagger. This bagger was accompanied by some sort of retard counselor or coach. As the bagger "worked," this coach cheered her on with outlandish lies, such as "You're doing so good!" As you may have guessed, this bagger was not doing good by any stretch of the imagination. Frankly, all she did was hinder my bagging efforts. That afternoon, I bagged some 80 percent of my orders, with the assistance of a so-called bagger. While scanning a slew of $200 orders, I took some time to coddle her, until I discovered how shockingly futile that effort was. To my amazement, the coach also assured this girl that her bagging abilities had not deteriorated in between jobs. So much for the "I'm new" excuse. Simply put, there was no justifiable reason for her to have shown up that day. The company and the customers most certainly would have been better served by someone who could produce results--or served at all.

I have seen such baggers work slowly, stupidly and in a manner that raises incredulous eyebrows. In short, they are getting paid for bullshit that would get regular people like you and I abruptly fired. Rather than receiving a swift termination that would be in the best interest of all concerned, they have attained job security. I don't know about you, but wouldn't that be great: for a real day's work at least. Corporate greed and government asininity have merged to reward incompetence and insult the American public in the process. Chew on this the next time you find yourself in the checkout line, or the unemployment line for that matter.