mae’s Reviews > Convenience Store Woman > Status Update

So that was it: now that she thinks he’s ‘one of us’ she can lecture him. She’s far happier thinking her sister is normal, even if she has a lot of problems, than she is having an abnormal sister for whom everything is fine. For her, normality—however messy—is far more comprehensible.

In other words, you play the part of the fictitious creature called ‘an ordinary person’ that everyone has in them. Just like everyone in the convenience store is playing the part of the fictitious creature called ‘a store worker.’

‘Getting fired from a casual job in a convenience store at his age! Hopeless, really. He’d be doing us all a favour if he dropped dead, seriously.’

Everyone laughed. ‘He really would,’ I said nodding, thinking that if I ever became a foreign object, I’d no doubt be eliminated in much the same way.

He really was just like me, uttering words that sounded human one really he wasn’t saying anything at all.

when you work in a convenience store, people often look down on you for working there. I find this fascinating, and I like to look at them in the face when they do this to me. And as I do so, I always think: that’s what a human is.

Infecting each other like this is how we maintain ourselves as human is what I think.

I’m now 36 years old, and the convenience-store -worker-me is 18. None of the other workers who did the training with me are here anymore, and we are now on our eight manager. Not a single product on sale in the store at that time is left. But I’m still here.