The Man Who Screamed at Me Because the Store Was Out of Bananas

I have been yelled at over many things in my grocery career. Expired coupons. The parking lot. The very existence of a rewards card. A woman once screamed at me because it was raining, as though I schedule the weather from behind register four. But nothing in eight years prepared me for the Banana Man.

It was a Sunday. We had a delivery truck break down somewhere on the interstate, which meant the produce order was late, which meant that for about four hours on one specific Sunday, our store had no bananas. That is it. That is the whole crime. No bananas, temporarily, due to a truck, in a way completely beyond the control of me, a nineteen-year-old part-timer restocking apples.

The man approached the empty banana display the way a detective approaches a body. He stood there. He stared at the hole where the bananas go. And then he turned to me, and I could see it happening behind his eyes, this slow gathering storm, and he said, "Where are the bananas."

"We're actually out right now," I said. "The truck got delayed, but we should have more by this afternoon --"

"OUT of BANANAS," he repeated, at a volume I did not know a person could reach standing still. "How is a GROCERY STORE out of BANANAS."

Now I want to defend bananas for a second here. They are, statistically, the most popular fruit on earth. We sell a truly upsetting number of them. So the idea that running out for a few hours was some catastrophic failure of the entire concept of a store was, I felt, a little dramatic. But I did not say that, because I liked having a job.

"I completely understand, sir," I said, in the voice, you know the voice, the flat calm voice we are all issued on our first day. "It should be resolved this afternoon."

"I drove here," he said, "for bananas."

"I understand."

"Specifically for bananas."

"I understand, sir."

And then this man -- this adult man, in public, in the produce section, in front of a mother and her small child who were slowly backing away toward the deli -- pointed at the empty display and shouted, "Then what am I supposed to do NOW?"

And reader, I want you to know that I had an out-of-body experience. Something in me, some exhausted thing that had restocked apples for three hours and been screamed at for a phenomenon involving a truck I never saw, took the wheel. And I heard my own mouth say, very calmly, "You could try a different fruit."

The silence was enormous. The child gasped. I am fairly sure a store speaker somewhere stopped playing music out of respect.

The man stared at me like I had suggested he eat the display itself. "A different," he began, and could not finish. "A DIFFERENT FRUIT." He said it like a curse. He said it like I had insulted his mother. And then he threw -- and this is real -- he threw a single apple. Not at me. Just down. He picked up one of the apples I had just stacked and he spiked it on the floor like a football, said "UNBELIEVABLE," and stormed out of the store, past the registers, past the very automatic doors, and out into a world that had briefly run out of bananas.

We got the truck at two. The bananas came in. I stacked them personally. And every time I see a banana now, I think of him, out there somewhere, still furious, still fruitless.