Making Change
Canter’s Deli is a West Hollywood landmark, a stretch of three conglomerated storefronts on Fairfax where oversized signs hark back to an era when “Open All Night” was an anomaly. Today it seems like a pillar of the neighborhood—an establishment sort of place where politicians come to shake hands and earn blue collar credibility. Professional athletes smile down beside their autographs. At noon, the room is dotted with lunch meetings, clusters of elbows and starched collars perching over tables full of pastrami on rye and chicken noodle soup. There are miles of flattering newsprint posted on the walls. But it was not always so. A blown up newspaper photo from 1960 shows a passel of leering hippies standing in the light shadow of Canter’s signs and reads “Then, as now, Canter’s was a countercultural eatery of choice. The cops kept an eye on it.” But sharing a pillar with a sign “Now Offering Sweet Potato Fries” ($4.99) is a photograph from the same year of Press Secretary Pierre Salinger buying JFK lunch. In a diner this big, there is room for presidents and hippies both.
From her voice on the phone and the general venerability of the place, I somehow expected Jacqueline Canter to be older than she is. Much of the diner seems not to have changed since the fifties, and what has was changed, one presumes, was changed in the 1970s: beige foam ceiling panels and backlit autumn leaf motifs on glass above the main dining hall. Most of the servers are frozen in that ambiguous state of jaded competence where it is hard to say whether they’ve had the job two years or twenty.
So I was surprised when the stately cashier turned me over to a spry woman in her forties with a lean, expressive face and a lengthy mane of wavy brown hair. There are 150 people on staff at Canter’s, Jacqueline told me, and she is responsible for the “hiring and the firing,” or “seeing who works out,” as she gently rephrased it. At the moment of my interview, in the relative calm of Canter’s northern dining room before the Monday lunch rush, Jacqueline was reconnoitering after a weekend at home, and “I don’t even know what we’re looking for, to be honest. Mondays are like this; I’m still trying to figure out what happened on the weekend.” There was a position in Bakery Sales on Sundays, and perhaps some hosting in between.
“Can you make change?” she asked me, standing up from the table. “That’s the most important thing, really.” I followed Jackie behind a mammoth horseshoe-shaped deli counter, imagining thousands of pounds of lunch meats neatly tucked away in stainless steel on either side of my knees. We stood before a tall cash register that appeared to have been operational since Day 1 at Canter Bros Delicatessen, which opened in 1933. “So let’s say it’s one thirty three…out…of…two dollars,” Jackie said haltingly as she wrote the numbers on a slip of register paper.
Ding! Out slid the till. “How would you make change for that?”
Moving right to left, I plucked two pennies, a nickel, a dime, and two quarters from the drawer and poured them into Jackie’s open palm. “Beautiful,” she said.
What a novelty: a cash register that compels you to count and subtract. Somehow, I was worried that I hadn’t done it right, so I began to backslide: “There are no bills, so I wouldn’t need to count it out for you, right?”
“You’re fine,” Jackie said. But where had this mania for change come from? Was it really
possible to find candidates who could fill out an application and fail to make proper change on the dollar?
Jackie and I walked back to the table and she looked my application over once again and circled my references. “OK, great,” she said. “So I’m going to check these out and I’ll call you back.”
“Thank you,” I said, “see you soon,” thinking instead: “That’s it?” This was my second prospecting visit to Canter’s—a ratio of about four hours of legwork to five minute of facetime. As I left, I saw another bakery sales hopeful being escorted behind the counter, counting change under Jackie’s watchful eye. It was hard to suppress my spite. “Come on,” I thought. “Give her more pennies. More pennies!” But the girl seemed composed, confident. She’d handled change before.
