Pay role number or Personality?

A visit to the supermarket. Nothing special. I just went to the usual place and bought usual things. With my basket full of things I waited at the cash counter for my turn. After paying I took my basket to the counter, where they check the billed items with the items in the basket and put your purchase in shopping bags. This is a quite slow process, I feel. Many a times, it had cost me lots of patience to still take the shopping bags from the girl at the counter with a smile. That day, while waiting I used the time to have a closer look at the girl. Young she was, she did her work slowly and concentrated. She was wearing a maroon colour overcoat like all employees. When I had almost turned my attention to something else, I suddenly noticed the badge pinned at the coat. I focused my eyes and read:

May I help You
No. 123

The usual shopping routine was disturbed. How ironic to keep a badge, which on the one hand offered personalized help to the customer, but on the other hand had the help come from a number. Number 123. It sounded more like a tag for a machine, a robot, but not for a human being.
A recent piece of information came back to my mind. Someone had talked to these young girls working at the supermarket. And they had told her, how they were all staying together in a dormitory, had very few leave days, and got a meagre salary for all this hardship.
Such working conditions are not an individual case. When a fire had struck a huge shop in Chennai one night and an employee died in the flames, the newspapers suddenly reported about very similar working conditions to those of the supermarket girls in Kerala.
When I read about it at that time, I was convinced that it was a phenomenon of big cities, never thought of the possibility of similar working conditions in tiny towns in Kerala. But it seems a much more common phenomenon. Ironically, this supermarket even belongs to a chain, whose concept is to offer consumer-friendly prices, below the maximum retail price. But this concept unfortunately does not seem to include an alternative approach to employment conditions.

The girl handed over my shopping bags to me. This time it wasn’t difficult to give her a smile and a thank you, despite her not having been the fastest that day either. I tried to interact with her as a person, and not a mere number.