Readers don't learn Sammy's name until the end of the story, even though he is the first-person narrator of the story. He is a checkout clerk at an A & P supermarket. His language indicates that, at age 19, he is both cynical and romantic. He notes, for instance, that there are "about twenty-seven old freeloaders" working on a sewer main up the street, and he wonders what the "bum" in "baggy gray pants" could possibly do with "four giant cans of pineapple juice." Yet when Queenie approaches him at the checkout, Sammy notes that "with a prim look she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. . . . Really, I thought that was so cute." He vacillates back and forth between these extremes of opinion during the story, calling some of his customers "houseslaves in pin curlers", yet he is sensitive enough that when Lengel makes Queenie blush, he feels "scrunchy inside." At the end of the story, he quits his job in an effort to be a hero to the girls and as a way of rebelling against a strict society. In a sudden moment of insight — an epiphany — he realizes "how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter" if he refuses to follow conventional paths.