It's 48 cents per pound, and that doesn't help me a bit

I grew up in a rural area and my mom had a huge garden. But she didn't grow everything. To this day, there are a few vegetables I don't recognize. And unless they are marked or in a bag, I'm going to have a time telling apart the various kinds of apples. OK, golden delicious, red delicious and Granny Smith are pretty easy. But is that mottled-looking one a Rome, a pink lady, a Jonagold or a gala? And then there are large and small of each variety. Applesauce sounds pretty good.

When I was in college, I applied for a cashier job at a local market. Part of the application was a produce test. Not common stuff -- the most obscure fruits and vegetables imaginable. I didn't get the job. Instead, I got a job putting housewares stuff on shelves and helping people pick out coffee makers.

It's nice that the growers place little stickers on apples to help cashiers tell them apart. Most produce carries a sticker with the 4- or 5-digit produce code. It's universal, by the way. Bananas are 4011 at Safeway, Kroger, SuperValu or good ol' Wal-Mart. And organic, on the vine tomatoes? 94664 no matter where you get them.

I have this little oddity -- I memorize stuff easily. I have phone numbers from 30 years ago stuck in my head, along with songs, dates, geographical locations I learned in grade school. Wisconsin has 72 counties, and I knew them all at one time. Still know most of them. So produce codes that I have to use pretty often? Toast. Other nearby cashiers know this -- "What's the code of those yellow peppers that look like jalapenos? Caribe peppers are 4772.

That doesn't mean I'm infallible. People bring me things I've never seen before and expect me to ring them up. Of course, those are the items without stickers. If they don't know what it is, if it's not in my "picture produce guide," I probably will have to send a customer service manager scrambling. Telling me something said 48 cents per pound isn't as helpful for inventory as punching in the right code -- although I will resort to department pricing if necessary.

Sunday took the cake -- maybe carrot cake? A customer had a selection of various produce. Couple of this, couple of that, a dozen little bags. First couple, no problem, common stuff. Garlic 4611, green beans 4066, avocados 4046. Then I hit some tomatoes. No stickers. Educated guess -- we sell lots of the hothouse Del Monte tomatoes -- 3151.

"That's not right."

"What?"

"Those tomatoes. That's way too much."

"I'm sorry. The tomatoes didn't have a produce code. Must have fallen off. Let me try another code."

"They didn't fall off. I took them off. I don't like stickers on my food."

I realized that the next 8 bags could be real fun with no stickers, so I quickly scanned the bags. Nothing that was going to be too challenging. I put the tomatoes in as the premium tomatoes -- which I figured would be more expensive. They were.

"Ma'am, do you remember how much the tomatoes were?"

"One dollar."

Uh oh. These were the Del Monte tomatoes, but sticker grabber lady saw the price for the small 3-packs and assumed it was the price per pound for these large hothouse grown ones. I explained the difference and after a bit, she remembered seeing the small tomatoes in 3-packs. "But I want these."

"OK, then we'll go back to the code for these tomatoes."

We had a couple more stutters over small vs. large lemons and small vs. large navel oranges. It could have been an ordeal for a cashier who didn't know the codes to begin with. Next time, I told her, take the stickers off at home when you wash them.