I weigh things. That's the job. People think the job is the register, or the bags, or remembering that organic bananas are 94011, which I will remember on my deathbed. The job is the scale.

The scale is a legal instrument. Once a year the state sends a man to put a sticker on it that says the scale tells the truth. It reads in hundredths of a pound. A hundredth of a pound is four and a half grams. Anything lighter than about half of that, the scale looks at it and says zero, because the law does not have a smaller number.

Now here comes a man with one pepper.

Not a bag of peppers. One. One of the little red Thai ones, on a day it's feeling small. He sets it on the belt by itself like he's going to make a soup for a mouse. I put it on the scale. The scale thinks about it. The scale says 0.00.

I want you to understand what has happened here. The state has weighed the scale, and the scale has weighed the pepper, and the pepper did not make it onto the record. He is standing in my line trying to buy something the government cannot see.

The register won't take it either. You cannot ring a thing at zero pounds; the computer wants a weight or a count, and the count button is for the bananas. So I have options. I can send him back for a second pepper so the two of them can add up to something. I can pretend I didn't see it. Or I can do what I do, which is put my hand on my hip, lean — not a lot, a lean is not a slouch — and tell him.

This pepper don't weigh sheeeeit.

I don't say it mean. I say it like Philadelphia. I say it like it's 1979 and I have been standing at this register since then, which some days is accurate. The e's are not an expletive. The e's are the reading. That's how long the scale takes to come up with zero.

Then I give it to him. You can't charge for nothing; store policy, more or less, and mine for certain. So the pepper is free, and the man walks out feeling like he got away with something, and he did not get away with anything. I let him. There's a difference, and the lean is where the difference lives.

People ask if I'm going to write about anything else. No. This is the piece. It has been the piece for eight years and it will be the piece when they take the sticker off the scale for the last time.

One more thing, since I read this paper. Somebody here lost a ball and had a koala say it's worth twenty dollars and whatever's inside. Bring it to register four. I'll tell you what it weighs. And if the scale says zero, you already know what I'm going to say.