The short story ‘A&P’ by John Updike is about Sammy, the protagonist and a 19-year-old cashier, who observes three girls wearing bikinis when they enter the A&P grocery store and imagines details about them with only their appearances. Sammy will then be attracted to the main girl, Queenie, and will defend her and her friends after his manager, Lengel, got mad for wearing inappropriate clothes. Eventually, Sammy quits his job after his argument with Lengel. Sammy’s decision on quitting made him act courageously because he was bored with doing his job and wanted to mature to become something in life, not as a cashier.
Sammy is a bored nineteen-year-old, and when he first sees the three wearing bikini girls entering the store, it is as if it was the highlight of his whole career of being a cashier. It has gotten to the point where he can memorize “the cat-and-dog-food-breakfast-cereal-macaroni-…soft drinks-crackers-and- cookies aisle” items (Updike, 1), as well as making a song out of the noise that the cash register does. This information points out that Sammy has a repetitive job and has to develop or imagine tasks to keep him well entertained. With his observing the girls, he realizes how different they are from the other customers and how the girls are disobeying society, shifting Sammy’s mind. Sammy’s new mindset has caused him to want to leave “the whole store that is like it was a pinball machine” (Updike, 2). It portrayed that Sammy wanted a change rather than being trapped inside that store and being sad that he has to do the same work every day. It looks like boredom got the best of Sammy, in which the only thing he has to do to solve his problem is to quit.
Along with the boredom, Sammy also wanted to mature and achieve something in life, and he felt like being a cashier would not do any good to him if he stays. In the story, Sammy compares himself to Stokesie, a 22-year-old coworker, and says that Stokesie has two babies and is married, which is the only difference between them. This makes Sammy wonder if his future will be exactly like Stokesie’s and will reject that by quitting. With that in thought, he is mature and acts as if he is on the same level as his coworker and as an adult, causing him to make independent decisions, like standing up for the three girls when they were in trouble. When Sammy saw his opportunity to quit, he got the chance to take it, and now he is able to do whatever he wants to do in his life. He has many choices to choose from now that he is free of working in the grocery store. As he quit, Lengel says to Sammy that he should not do this to his mom and dad. This conveys that Sammy is not the only person who will face consequences, but to his parents as well. However, Sammy is very aware of his decision, but he is standing up for what he believes is best for him, despite the hard outcomes and obstacles that he will face in unemployment.
In the end, Sammy’s courageous decision on quitting was because he was bored and wanted to become the mature person he always wanted to be. If Sammy never quit, he could have stayed behind the cash register for as long as he lives. Sammy is not the type to follow any rules, and he clearly wanted to lead and stand up for what he believes in when he stood up for those girls. Although he did not get any recognition from the girls, he knows that what he had to do had to be done at some point. He made a statement, and he stuck with it even when he is hesitating about his decision.
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