What does it take to succeed as a competitive grocery bagger?
A lot of commitment and dedication. You get judged on three things. One is speed because you don’t want people waiting in line for a long time. You also need to pack the bags accurately because you can’t have bread or eggs on the bottom. And then there’s weight distribution. So usually you get two bags in paper, three bags in plastic to pack all the groceries at the competition, and you need to have it evenly weighted. The idea for that is when you leave the store, you don’t want a customer to have one super, super heavy bag and one light bag. Usually that’s where a competition is won or lost is in the weight distribution. How does one actually train for competition? Each state sends one state champion. So a bunch of different stores will train their employees and they’ll go to regional competitions or state competitions, and the winner will go on to Vegas. A lot of the time it will be the store manager [who acts as a trainer]. Some of the stores are really committed to it, and they’ll
