The Trolley Workers by Paul Kimm

A neighbour two down from us was the only person we directly knew who lost someone. A family member that is. Even though just a distant cousin of theirs, it tore their family apart. Just like it did many families, and how it changed the whole fabric of how we live. Looking back on it now you wouldn’t think such an innocuous job could matter so much, that it could change everything about how we live, but it did. Of course, the tragedy of so many going like that is the main thing, the sheer lack of explanation to this day and how we do things now is borderline unfathomable. Most of all though, I think about our neighbour’s second cousin, just one of thousands, an estimated sixteen thousand, but knowing someone who knew one of them, who left us on that day, just makes it so close.

Everyone remembers the day. Our Keith dropped me off at the Sainsburys in Washington to get our weekly shop in, then, as he always did, popped to his bookies for a few bets for the hour it took me, before coming back to pick me up. It was clear something wasn’t right as soon as I got near the entrance. Obviously at that point there was no concept of what had happened, but the queue of customers outside, waiting for more trolleys to be available, was unusual. I joined the back of the queue and asked the person in front of me.

‘What’s the queue for?’

‘There’s no trolleys coming in so we’re all waiting for them.’

‘Why aren’t more trolleys coming in? They must have seen the line.’

‘I don’t know, but I can’t be doing mine with a basket. I need a trolley.’

‘Me too, pet. I need a trolley as well.’

It was only five minutes or so, but the queue didn’t budge, no one was bringing back empty trolleys. The number of people behind me had grown as well and I reckon there were close to a hundred of us waiting. It was at that point I said I was going to look for myself and went into the car park and the trolley drop off points. There were plenty there, so I just took one and wheeled it in past the queue. It seemed odd to me that I was the first to do it, but after that others also went to get their own. Of course, I gave it no other thought other than thinking Sainsburys needed to employ more trolley workers.

I told Keith about it in the car journey back home, how the queue grew and grew, and no trolleys came, and how I was the first to go and get one myself. He joked about what a great story that was, how I should tell everyone about it when we see them. He was being daft and sarcastic like he does. In fact, when we got back to the house the first thing he did was get me to tell my eldest, Zoe, and her husband, Paul, about the ‘amazing’ trolley story, which I did as they all feigned exaggerated mock interest. Our Zoe’s husband, who writes short stories in his spare time, even jested he’d be sure to write one about it, bound to be a best seller he said. I’m telling you this bit because it wasn’t until the news the next morning, we all realised something very strange had happened. It seems awful to say it now, but on the day itself it was nothing more than a silly joke.

It was just the second or third item on the news on that first day of reporting. Keith called me from the kitchen to come and watch it with him. Across the country, in all UK supermarkets, as far as was known, all trolley workers had disappeared. Interviews with supermarket managers, relatives of trolley workers, retail employment experts, police chiefs, all spoke of how all the folk who bring the trolleys back into the supermarket had seemingly walked off during their shifts, not clocked out, not said goodbye. Family members ranging from very worried to distraught, some of them just sixteen-year-old part-timers, simply hadn’t come back home, weren’t picking up their mobiles, hadn’t said anything to anyone, had just not come home. Police spokespeople said it wasn’t something to be alarmed about and they were working closely with employers and families to work out what had occurred, that speculation wasn’t required right now, just solid investigation.

As the week wore on the investigations came up with nothing. More and more it became clear that every single person who worked on bringing the trolleys back in to the supermarkets across the entire country had vanished off the face of the Earth. No other workers of any kind had gone, all the till workers, shelf stackers, counter assistants, storeroom folk, managers, delivery drivers, the whole lot, were all completely fine. Not one of the missing trolley workers had turned up or said goodbye. Families and friends hadn’t received any information about a single trolley worker they knew. An estimated sixteen thousand people, who all had that same particular job, gone. Just gone.

Within the week all supermarkets had banned use of trolleys. All of them were gathered up and locked away in storage. They said they’d get more large baskets with wheels on them, increase the delivery workforce, provide free deliveries to the elderly and disabled people, but at that point it was necessary for full investigations to be conducted before allowing trolley usage again. The Prime Minister, and other relevant politicians, spoke out about how everything possible was being done to get answers to the issue, and that all families with missing trolley workers were receiving all the support possible.

Keith spoke to John and Maggie from two doors down about their cousin, Mike, who, like all other trolley workers, no one had heard anything from. It was this nothingness that destroyed friends and families of the missing trolley workers. Knowing how someone had gone was better than knowing nothing at all. Speculation was rife. People tried to work out what time exactly they’d all gone or was it over a short period of time. I felt awful that I’d been there, at the Sainsburys in Washington, probably just moments after they all disappeared, that I was one of the first people, perhaps in the country, to push the trolley of a vanished worker. It gave me guilt, but also fear that I might have touched something I shouldn’t have, and, being completely honest, gratitude on waking every morning that I was still here.

It took two months until the government and police admitted some form of defeat in terms of explaining what had occurred and declared that as a society we needed to try to regain normality. It was late March when supermarkets started hiring for new trolley workers. They’d factored in the rise in deliveries, the use of the larger wheeled baskets, and decided on a required recruitment figure of four thousand people. The salary of an average trolley worker went up by over fifty percent as no one wanted to do it. It was seen by many as a mark of disrespect to apply for the jobs, by others as a genuine risk. Those applying, and willing to be interviewed on television about their applications, said they had no choice, times were hard and they needed work. I agreed with Keith that I’d stick to deliveries or the bigger baskets, that I’d never touch a trolley again.

The second wave came precisely a week after the new trolley workers all started. Despite the supermarkets saying they’d put new checks and balances in, whatever that meant, that they’d increased security and surveillance, the three-thousand-eight-hundred-and-forty new trolley workers all vanished into thin air sometime between half past one and two o’clock on the last Friday afternoon of April. Not a single witness again, not one trolley worker caught on camera either walking off, or just leaving sight, but again, just like the first wave, the trolleys stopped being brought back in, and none of the trolley workers came home. All the same scenes in the newspapers, and on the news, were played out again. The only end result being that trolleys were banned permanently and the way we all do and feel about our shopping changed.

As with the first wave, the second wave presented no clues at all to the trolley workers’ disappearance. Theories about why it happened, why on Fridays, why only the UK, why only supermarkets and not other stores, such as B&Q, IKEA, Halfords, who had lost no trolley workers, were the main topics people spoke about. Everyone had an opinion, be it aliens, a government or business conspiracy, a way to control the masses, to distract from the real issues in the world, but none of them fit. When we think about John and Maggie’s cousin and what it did to their family, it just comes back to the grief and horror of not knowing that matters. All the discussions about why, if trolleys should have been banned, the international debates with global leaders whether other countries should ban trolleys, or carts as they call them in the US, don’t matter. The horror, the fear and sadness of doing the weekly shop, the sorrow on people’s faces in the supermarkets are what has really changed to folk like me and Keith, like John and Maggie.

The whole country has changed as well of course. Politicians tell us the economy has suffered ‘immeasurably’, supermarkets have had to drop profits in order to manage new ways of working, prices and taxes will have to rise to manage it. Tourism to the UK has plummeted, foreigners don’t think of red post boxes, the royal family, Big Ben, fish and chips anymore, their first thought is our country is the one that lost all its trolley workers with zero explanation as to why. Until this morning, a world without trolley workers, and all that’s meant, is what life has become in the UK. Today is exactly a year since the first wave, and around ten months since the second wave, twenty thousand friends and family gone, and still gone.

Then this morning happened. I told Keith last night I didn’t want to watch the news today. That memory of pushing that trolley when I didn’t want to wait in the queue has never left, it still haunts me. I simply didn’t want to watch the TV and watch the first-year commemorations, to relive the news of the second wave, to see all those clips of families beside themselves with confusion and terror. I was keeping myself busy, slowly putting away this week’s Sainsbury delivery, and Keith kept calling me in.

‘I said I don’t want to watch it, Keith. Leave me be.’

‘Pet, you have to come and see it. Please Beryl, will you come and see this?’

Because of the urgency in his voice I came through. We’re sitting on the sofa, next to each other now, not knowing what to say. An estimated fifty-thousand they are saying. Sometime between eleven and eleven-thirty this morning. No phones being picked up, those who’ve finished their shifts haven’t come home, no one has seen anyone of them, no reported camera footage as yet. Across the entire UK, in every supermarket, all the shelf stackers have vanished.

Paul Kimm

Image: Supermarket from the interior of a trolley – from pixabay.com