French checkout girl, Anna Sam's book takes revenge on rude shoppers

by Adam Sage

Anna Sam has witnessed thieves, drunks and lovers. She has put up with rudeness, indifference and ignorance, and has gleaned what she describes as an almost unparalleled insight into the full extent of human stupidity.

Now, after eight years as a supermarket checkout worker, she has turned the table on her customers with a book that depicts their behaviour as they push their trolleys around the aisles.

It is not a pleasant sight. She says that social etiquette is cast aside as shoppers jump queues, squabble and show the utmost disdain for the women, and occasionally the men, behind the till. "You see people as they really are," Mrs. Sam told The Times. "They behave as though they were in their living room and they forget that the checkout girls are watching them. It's incredible."

Often appalled and sometimes amused at the antics of the average French shopper, Mrs. Sam, 28, began to write about her experiences in a blog last year. This proved a success - with 600,000 visits to date - and thrust her into the media spotlight as the public voice of the supermarket worker in France. After she appeared on prime-time television, publishers fought with each other to offer a book deal to the woman described by one daily as France's most popular check-out employee.

The work, Les tribulations d'une caissière (The Trials and Tribulations of a Check-Out Girl), was published last week amid another swirl of publicity. But Mrs. Sam never intended to end up in a supermarket. She was a literary student in Rennes, where she specialised in Jean Ray, a cult Belgian author dubbed the Edgar Allan Poe of the French language.

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