I watched a man—the kind of man I’m certain could dismantle and rebuild a Jeepney engine just by listening to its hum—get humiliated by a teenage trainee over a carton of eggs. His crime? He didn’t own a smartphone.
It was 5:30 PM on a Friday at the SM Supermarket in Quezon City. The air inside was a thick soup of rotisserie Lechon Manok, the sweat of the rush-hour crowd, and that stagnant Manila humidity seeping through the glass. The LED lights hummed with a tired buzz that drilled straight into my temples after a twelve-hour shift at the shipyard.
I was standing in line at Register 7, the only lane with a human cashier. My basket held a few cans of San Miguel beer and a pack of instant noodles. My safety boots were heavy with grease, and my patience was thinner than a sheet of rolling paper.
Ahead of me was an old-timer. Let’s call him Lolo Cardo.
Cardo looked like a limestone cliff in Palawan, weathered down by time. He wore a faded Barong shirt with a frayed collar. His hands were a living diary: knuckles swollen with arthritis, skin like tanned leather, and faint white scars mapping out decades of manual labor at the piers.
He was carefully placing his items on the belt: a small bag of rice, a pack of Pan de sal, a dozen eggs, and a large bag of premium dog food. The expensive kind. The kind that costs more than a feast at Jollibee these days.
The scanner beeped. “1,250 Pesos,” the young cashier said, her lips painted a deep red, idly chewing gum.
Lolo Cardo froze. With a trembling hand, he pulled a crinkled newspaper clipping from his breast pocket, its edges worn thin.
“Hija,” he said, his voice gravelly but polite. “This flyer says the eggs are 120 Pesos. And this dog food is 30% off. Why is the machine showing such a high price?”
The girl didn’t even look at the paper. She pointed a manicured finger at a small sign taped to the Plexiglas.
“That’s the Digital Deal, sir. You have to activate the coupon in the SM Advantage app.”
Cardo looked bewildered. “The app?”
“Yes. Download the app, create an account with your email or phone number, scan the QR code on the shelf, and ‘click’ the coupon. Then you scan your digital ID here. Otherwise, you pay full price.”
Lolo Cardo reached into his pocket and pulled out a phone. It wasn’t a smartphone. It was an old Nokia, the black plastic casing held together by electrical tape to keep the battery from falling out.
“I don’t have the internet on this, hija. I just have… a phone. But I have the paper right here. It says the price is 120.”
“I can’t change the price manually, sir. The system is locked. No app, no discount.”
A heavy silence fell over the line. I watched Cardo’s shoulders slump. It wasn’t about the few hundred Pesos. It was the realization that the world he helped build had erected a digital wall to shut him out.
Behind me, a man in a sharp suit—likely a corporate hotshot from Makati—let out a long, theatrical sigh. He tapped the face of his latest Apple Watch.
“Come on,” Suit Guy muttered, loud enough to be heard. “It’s just some loose change, pops. Pay it or move aside. Some of us have a date to get to.”
Cardo went rigid. The shame radiated off him like heat off asphalt. He opened his wallet; inside were 20 and 50 Peso bills, neatly flattened and arranged. He was doing the math in his head, and the numbers clearly weren’t adding up.
“Okay,” Cardo whispered, his voice cracking. “Take back the eggs. And the rice.”
He kept the dog food.
My blood began to boil. Not at the cashier—she was just another cog in the machine. Not even entirely at the Suit Guy, though he was a jerk. I was angry at the cold, automated mess of it all.
Cardo was about to push the eggs back when I stepped forward.
“Leave them,” I said, my voice louder than I intended.
I walked up beside Cardo and pulled out my smartphone—the damn device I have to charge every night, the thing that tracks my location and now apparently decides who gets to eat affordable eggs. I opened the clunky app.
“Scan mine,” I told the cashier.
The scanner beeped. The numbers on the screen danced. 1,250 Pesos dropped to 850 Pesos.
Four hundred Pesos. They were overcharging an old man 400 Pesos because he didn’t want to trade his personal data for a discount code.
“I’ve got the rest,” I said, tossing a 500-peso bill on the counter to cover my stuff and the gap for him.
Lolo Cardo looked at me, his pale, watery eyes clouded with a thin film of tears. “Son, you don’t have to…”
“I’m not doing it for charity, sir,” I said, looking directly at the Suit Guy. “I’m doing it because the system is broken.”
The Suit Guy suddenly found the nutritional facts on a pack of gum fascinating and refused to meet my eyes.
I helped Lolo Cardo carry the heavy bag of dog food out to the parking lot. The Manila sun was setting, casting long, burnt-orange shadows over the potholed pavement. He walked with a limp—the kind you get from jumping off loading docks for a lifetime.
He stopped at an old Isuzu pickup truck from the 90s. The body was rusted at the wheel wells, but the engine block was spotless; you could tell it was maintained with love.
“Thank you,” Cardo said, leaning against the truck door. “I could have paid the full price, but… my SSS pension hasn’t gone up much, while the price of eggs has flown into the sky.”
“I know,” I said. “But why did you put back the rice and eggs instead of the dog food? You can’t eat that for dinner.”
Cardo cracked a smile. It was a sad, beautiful expression.
“Buster,” he said softly. “He’s a Golden Retriever. Twelve years old. His hips are failing him. My wife, Rosa… she passed away last year. During her final days, when she couldn’t leave the bed, Buster never left her side. Not once. He guarded her while she slept; he licked her hand when the pain got bad. Before she closed her eyes, I promised her that as long as I was breathing, I would take care of him like our own flesh and blood.”
He patted the bag of expensive food.
“I can drink tap water. I can skip the eggs. But Buster gets the best for his joints. That was the deal. A man keeps his word.”
I felt a lump in my throat the size of a grapefruit.
Here was a man being penalized by society for being “outdated.” The corporate algorithms saw him as an inefficiency. The Makati hotshot saw him as an obstacle.
But he was a man who prioritized a promise to his late wife over his own hunger. He was a man who drove a truck he could fix with his own hands because he didn’t trust machines he couldn’t understand.
“They don’t make them like you anymore, Lolo,” I said.
“No,” he chuckled, climbing into the cab. “And maybe that’s for the best. I don’t know how to work the apps. I just know how to work.”
He started the engine. It didn’t purr; it roared—a real, mechanical sound. He waved and slowly merged into the gridlock of Manila traffic.
I stood there for a minute, watching his taillights fade. My phone buzzed in my pocket with a notification: ‘Rate your shopping experience!’
I shoved it deep into my pocket.
We are building a world that is efficient, streamlined, and interconnected. We have apps for groceries, apps for dating, apps to track our sleep. But in our digital rush, we are abandoning the very people who laid the foundation we stand on.
We are replacing handshakes with “User Agreements.” We are replacing character with “Credit Scores.” And we are replacing common decency with “Exclusive Digital Offers.”
The next time you’re in line behind an elder counting out coins or struggling with a card reader, don’t sigh. Don’t roll your eyes.
Remember that those trembling hands might have welded the steel in the bridge you drive over. They might have held a rifle to protect the freedom you use to stand there and be impatient.
Technology makes life faster. But only empathy makes life worth living. Don’t let the screen light up your face so much that it darkens your heart.