BY MICHAEL KENNEDY
VIRGINIA BEACH — I’ve always been a big fan of Clint Eastwood.
As an actor, he’s appeared in more than 60 films spanning a 65-year career. That includes films he directed himself.
I’ve seen most of his work because I worked in a movie theatre for more than four decades.
From the old westerns to the Dirty Harry days to the goofy role partnered with an orangutan and beyond, I’ve always appreciated his quotable one-liners. I have many favorites, but one particular quote came to mind recently.
I was grocery shopping at a local big-box store. I walked across the front of the store in search of the shortest line when it came time to check out.
I am a patient person except for when it comes to standing in a line. I’m much better at it than I used to be, thanks in part to iPhone technology. It allows me to read emails or surf the net while standing in lines that make me feel like I may or may not make it back home before St. Patrick’s Day.
At one end of the check out area was the self-service section. It had about a dozen or so registers with one lone employee, standing by herself, who I assume was supervising the customers while they worked. The line to get into this register corral was easily ten folks deep.
I have no problem with doing my own scanning and bagging, but on this day, my preference was to let someone else take on that task. I continued my journey in search of a reasonably open register staffed by a real person and not the self-service voice directing me to place my item in the bagging area.
But such a line was not to be found on this particular day and time. Sure, there were many register lines in existence – enough, no doubt, that if this store was to suddenly put tickets on sale for the next Taylor Swift concert, they’d have the lines and registers available to sell tickets to all of Virginia Beach.
The problem was that none of them were open or staffed. So I continued my journey, and it only took, in terms of my impatient internal clock, a few hours to reach the other end of the store’s check-out zone.
However, to no one’s surprise, the other end also had a self-check-out corral with another dozen or so self-checkout registers – yet another employee holding down the fort.
Since my car was parked closest to the other side of the store, I turned around and headed back to the other side with the resignation that I was about to again stand in line and again have to do all the work. At least I had a cart full of food in case I was destined to spend the rest of the day in wait.
I recalled Clint Eastwood’s line from the movie Heartbreak Ridge. As a leader training Marines, he tells his complaining underlings: “You improvise. You adapt. You overcome.”
Isn’t that exactly what we all find ourselves doing in this post-Covid world?
We are adapting, striving to overcome, looking for opportunities to improvise.
The retail world certainly is. This store likely doesn’t have the staffing available to open additional check-out lines. They’ve improvised and embraced the self-service technology which allows them to process transactions with minimal staffing and overcome the shortage.
It was a bit of an epiphany moment for me when I fully realized that 2019 is long gone and never to return. It’s 2022 now – nearly 2023 – and life is different for us all.
But it doesn’t have to be as difficult as we sometimes make it. We need to continue our own adapting, improvising, overcoming.
With a smile, whenever possible.
I’m trying to embrace it, and that’s something I hope we can all do among the frustrations we sometimes face in a world that has changed so dramatically in a relatively short time.
The right mindset can make your day.
The author retired after 44 years with Regal Cinemas and is pursuing a career in business coaching and consulting. He is active in community service and enjoys time with his wife, Kim, and daughter, Kara.
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