Groceries.

My students always used to ask what sorts of things were different in France. On the spur of the moment, it’s hard to come up with an answer like that. Like when someone asks you, “What sorts of movies do you like?” All of a sudden, you think, What do I like? Well, a couple of days ago something happened that I can cite as a definitive difference between France and America.

E and I went grocery shopping twice last week: once to the Sunday market for produce and fresh bread, and once to the store mid-week for everything else. Unfortunately, I’d already run out of produce when we went to the store on Wednesday, so I picked up some apples, cherries, and tomatoes to hold me over until Sunday. As is customary in France, for the surge of customers waiting to check out, there was one open cash register (and four closed ones [and a handful of unoccupied employees who weren’t about to get to work {which reminds me of a French comedian who said that Obama’s “Yes, we can!” slogan would never work in France. They operate more along the lines of, “No, we can’t!”}]). Anyway, when I finally got up to the front, I put everything on the little conveyor belt, just as one does in the States. Everything went smoothly until we got to the produce. “Il faut les peser,” the cashier informed me. Because I was flustered, I couldn’t catch the words, so I asked her to repeat. She did, and added, “Je vous attendrai.” Great, so I had to go back to the display where I picked up my produce so that I could weigh it, all the while with her waiting for me at the front with the other six shoppers in line behind me.

I had no problems with the apples or tomatoes, but I simply could not find the button on the scale for cherries. So that I wouldn’t hold anyone up any longer, I just pushed the “grapes” button and hoped for the best. Close enough, right? By the time I rushed back to the front where she was indeed waiting with the rest of my purchases, the line had increased by three more shoppers. I was so embarrassed about holding these people up for so long that I wanted to crawl under that produce display and become a troll as a cautionary tale for other unsuspecting Americans.

The weird thing is that no one seemed especially put off by my unintentional antics—and it was the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday! They looked at me as though I were a fish in an aquarium. What is this species, one seemed to ask another in French eye language. Why is its face turning red? It appeared as though no one was really in a hurry. Certainly the cashier was not: she’d been talking to the customer before me about going south for vacation—the French get six weeks of paid vacation per year—long after she was done ringing up the woman’s purchases. The other potential cashiers were not in a hurry; they were instead ambling around the grocery store without a care in the world. Even the customers were more curious than frustrated. In America I would’ve been raked over the coals.

When Jeff and I had our neighbor F over last month, this same thing came up. I asked F what was the most surprising thing about America, after having grown up in Austria. He said, “It surprises me how quickly everyone moves in the stores. We move through the line fast, always. What if you love your customer and you want to say, ‘Your barber did a good job this week’? You cannot do it. You must just move, move, move.” Upon asking the same question to Professor B, a French professor from the region where we’re staying now, I was given the same response: “Why are Americans always in a hurry in the stores? If something takes awhile, we could just talk to each other in line, no problem. And what if we want to talk to the person who works for the store? But you cannot do it! We are rushed all the time.”

It’s a surprising thought.

But would it work in America?

Call it greed, call it capitalism, call it “making an honest living”…but one thing we hold dear in America is making money. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way. We want to take vacations to get away from the stress of everyday life, we want our children to go to highly rated private schools, we want to shop at Whole Foods or Greenlife so we get the cleanest food possible. Our lives require a lot of money. If we were to slow down in stores or in restaurants, we’d accommodate fewer customers, thereby bringing in less money. In France, for example, it’s common for a restaurant to fill up and then shut its doors for the night: patrons will stay from seven o’clock until midnight, lingering over bread, wine, and cheerful conversation. Would slowing down in this manner be worth the exchange we’d make? We would make a smaller profit, but we would know people better and perhaps, for that reason, benefit from increased national solidarity. Would racial anger begin to dissipate? Would religious extremism attenuate? Would we be physically healthier if we took things a little more slowly? Or would it make a difference at all? Perhaps we are too ingrained in our ways, too dependent on our money and independent of each other, for anything to change. After all, as a hardened introvert, I have trouble imagining myself talking to people for long periods of time at the grocery store or spending hours at the dinner table with others. Perhaps talking in line at the grocery store and lingering at the table wouldn’t make a difference. And we would probably have to give up the private schools and find other sources for the organic food.

I don’t think the French are wrong or the U.S. is wrong here, but perhaps we could benefit from each other. What’s the most important thing to get out of our lives, and how is the best, most balanced way to do it? I’d love to know what you think.