The checkout belt divider

Found wedged between the last of one order and the first of the next, on belts in supermarkets everywhere, the divider is a small plastic bar, usually black, occasionally advertising a mortgage rate along its flank, and it has exactly one job, which is to be a fence four inches high, performed with the flat confidence of something that has never once been asked to arbitrate an actual dispute. Shoppers place it themselves, which is the interesting part: no clerk assigns it, no sign explains it, and it is, in this sense, furniture that convenes itself. Fourteen transactions on a Tuesday afternoon turned up eleven dividers deployed voluntarily, two forgotten entirely, and one repurposed, briefly and without ceremony, as a squeegee for a spilled inch of coffee. Its authority is entirely social. A cart's worth of yogurt will sit two inches from a stranger's raw chicken with total equanimity provided the plastic bar stands between them; remove it and the same two inches feels indecent, almost an imposition. This is more than can be said for most furniture twice its size and considerably more expensive. The divider does not know whose oranges are whose, and does not attempt to find out. It only marks that a boundary was requested, and grocery stores turn out to be one of the last places strangers will still cooperate on a fiction like that, promptly, without argument, and without being asked twice.

Beatrice Womack