Paper, Meet Plastic
After a half-decade of arranging blind dates, Janet Vandercook has learned that single women stock up on diet food--”your Slim-Fast, your Lean Cuisine”--while single men shop day to day, usually in the morning, and buy healthy--”your fruits, your vegetables, your tuna for barbecuing.”
Vandercook is a grocery clerk. For a decade, after a divorce left her with little income and four children, she worked at a Pavilions register in the town where she grew up, South Pasadena. Her favorite word is “absolutely”--as in, “I absolutely, truly love my customers”--so it’s no surprise that she had regulars who bypassed the 15-items-or-less line for hers. Estimated number of regulars: 200.
About five years ago, Vandercook noticed two things more or less at the same time. One, an awful lot of single, lonely regulars were moving through her line every day, and, two, about the only real luck she’d had after three years with a dating service was setting up her own Great Expectations counselor on a date.
And so, by the glow of the price scanner, she set up what became perhaps the busiest dating service in South Pasadena, matchmaking her customers. Vandercook counseled about 40 single shoppers, beginning with available San Marino retirees. There were glitches. An 86-year-old man complained in line that his cuddly 70-year-old date was “too old.” Plus, Vandercook says, it was hard to judge her successes because “if I never saw them again, I didn’t know if it was because the date went bad or because they’re so old you wonder if they died.”
Her forte became the thirtysomething divorcee and the fortysomething bachelor. It took about five purchases before a single registered on her internal Rolodex. “That’s the good thing about a checker,” Vandercook says, “and the bad thing about an anonymous dating service--the human contact. I knew my customers.”
There were rules about whom she would take on as a “client.” Nix on employees (“I’d hear about it for an eight-hour shift if it went wrong”); male clients had to be attractive to the grocery clerk (“That ruled out all whiners”); and a postmodern take on gender helped (“I asked one man I was unsure of if he’d ever been with a man, and he said, ‘That depends--do you mean when I’m a man or a woman?’ I said, “ ‘Excuse me?’ ”) Twenty or so couples met through Vandercook, though she doesn’t know if South Pasadena’s marriage rate rose.
She recently transferred to Pavilions Place in Pasadena. Will her legacy survive? Vandercook, for one, is not worried. “I don’t think their relationships have to last in order to be successful,” Vandercook says. “If anything, they now have another human being they can say ‘hello’ to in line.”
(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)
Turnstile Turnoffs
What grocery clerk/budding matchmaker Janet Vandercook doesn’t like to see in the checkout line:
“Someone with five boxes of condoms. I don’t set up players.”
“Someone who complains about prices.”
“Someone with cheap wine. Although, in that case, I try to set them up with a person who couldn’t care less, someone else who buys cheap wine.”
