ABSTRACT

Rituals can be seen as being essentially sequential acts which are socially significant. The encounter ritual takes the linguistic form of a set of opening and closing moves, and the central section involves a set of moves for payment to be made by the customer. The encounter ritual takes the linguistic form of a set of opening and closing moves, and the central section involves a set of moves for payment to be made by the customer. The typical interchanges between customers and checkout operators look on the face of it as though they have little room for an individual operator to be different from others in that they are highly formulaic and the discourse structure of the matrix interchange is highly restrictive. It is clear that supermarket checkout operators corroborate the hypothesis that where routine actions are accompanied by routine speech, such speech will be largely formulaic.