Coal

by Kim Alba
I ventured to the Coal supermarket for a cucumber and onion so I could make a pasta and tuna salad. After making my choices and bagging them individually, I thought about weighing the veggies. This only came to mind because, at the small grocery store we went on our first day in Cagli, a woman took my vegetables and weighed them. But when I lined up to pay for my groceries at Coal, the clerk looked at my vegetables and told me something in Italian, which I took to mean that I had to get them labeled with the price and weight. So I had to go back to the produce section and figure out how to use the scale/labeling machine. Luckily, I saw each type of vegetable was marked with a number, so I pressed the corresponding numbers for cucumbers and onions for each bagged item and — presto! — out came a label. When I went back to the cashier line, the clerk did not have see any problems with anything else. The experience reminded me that the grocery stores in the U.S. have inputted all their items into computers, so customers just have to bring their produce to the checkout line and the clerk would handle the transaction.