"NEUNUNDVIERZIG!" "FÜNFUNDZWANZIG!" "DREIUNDSIEBZIG!"
I hadn’t been expecting all this when I popped into my local supermarket. Was this some peculiar German tradition I didn’t know about, I wondered? Had the cashier, for some reason, decided to indulge in a quick game of bingo?
Having filled my trolley with pretzels, I joined a queue of similarly bemused-looking customers waiting to pay - none of whom, I noted, were clutching bingo cards. I peered ahead. The livid woman on the till was serving a customer who I guess was probably new to Germany, and certainly wasn’t used to German supermarkets. He didn’t quite have enough money to pay for the handful of items he’d selected, so he was trying to choose which things he could do without. The problem was that every time he made a suggestion, the cashier would yell the new number of cents he owed at the top of her voice, so that the whole shop could hear.
As is well known, maths becomes harder when you’re being shouted at, which was perhaps one reason that the customer was struggling to produce the exact change. This went on for some time, the cashier’s voice getting steadily angrier and the customer getting ever more flustered. Could she simply have accepted one of his suggestions, taken in all his coins, and given him change from the till? Presumably. But really, why bother, when a customer has the temerity to try to buy slightly more basic food supplies than they can afford.
A few basic observations. First, shouting doesn’t make German any easier to understand. This is actually a criticism often levelled at the British. Many a Briton has gone to Europe arrogant enough to assume that the local population will understand them perfectly if they simply talk in slower, louder English than usual. But obviously, that is fundamentally not how language works. True, of course you should be able to speak the language of the country you’re living in - but learning a language is very difficult and takes a long time. Until you’ve mastered it, everything - yes, everything, including grocery shopping - is significantly harder.
The second point is related: numbers in German are ridiculous. You say the smaller number before the bigger one: siebenbundzwanzig rather than zwanzig-und-sieben. There is no rational reason for this, especially because - thank goodness - you write down the numbers in the correct order: 27. So, while learning German numbers should still be pretty high on the list of priorities, in stressful situations, numbers are always going to be one of the first things out of the window.
Third, there is nobody on the planet who has not been in stressful situations, and nobody who wouldn’t be embarrassed about not having enough money to buy basic supplies. When someone is struggling, the right thing to do is always to help them as much as you can. It is never justifiable to publicly humiliate someone who clearly intends no malice.
Fourth, nobody has ever treated me with such astonishing disrespect, in the full year I’ve been in Germany, even though my German is awful and I’m totally unused to a majority of German customs. I doubt that I need to spell out the reason for this: it relates to where I’m from, or rather where I’m not from. But in truth, I’m new here too, and if that guy deserves to be treated like that, then I probably do as well. Or, perhaps, neither of us do.
The final point in defence of my fellow shopper is that one and two cent coins look almost exactly the same. I still find it very difficult to tell them apart at speed. The bloody European Union, eh.
