‘Fairly provocative’: The SF grocery cashier running social experiments at checkout |
For the past six months, customers at Luke’s Local in San Francisco’s Cow Hollow have been getting something extra with their groceries: a question of the day, courtesy of cashier Thomas Viollier, a French-born, beanie-wearing Daft Punk devotee who conducts polls between scanning avocados.
No one asked Viollier to do this. He just felt like it. And since he got started, more than 100 head-scratching questions have passed through his black Sharpie onto brown paper bags, each one earning a small, earnest tally mark as customers share — and sometimes revise — their answers.
Some of Thomas Viollier’s “question of the day” polls on brown paper bags at Luke’s Local on Union Street in San Francisco, on Dec. 11, 2025.
The polls may be flimsy in material, but they’ve proved surprisingly sturdy in effect. Easily 10 times per day, a customer will ask Viollier for the question if he hasn’t already offered it, or if it’s not in eyeshot from the checkout line.
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They’ve become such a fixture that regulars say the day’s question has kept them up at night.
Some customers will circle back with a response they’ve been mulling over since last week. Others will recall a question from a month earlier and report that they’ve changed their mind, while Viollier gently tucks an $11.99 carton of eggs into their canvas tote.
One customer, who works at Salesforce, told Viollier they’d started using his poll prompts to kick off team meetings in the tower.
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For regulars Sunita Rao and Nick Eppinger, who recently moved to Cow Hollow from New York, the questions have helped make a new neighborhood feel like home. On days when Viollier is working, their errand run comes with an element of surprise. “We chat about potential questions as we shop around for our groceries before checkout,” they told SFGATE.
The questions range from the techno-moral (“Do you prefer your car with or without a human driver?”) to the food-related (“Which kind of tomato is best for a caprese salad?”) to the unexpectedly probing (“How do you evaluate expired foods?”) — with the occasional soft, sensory confessional tossed in (“Does rain help you sleep?”).
Thomas Viollier, a cashier at Luke’s Local on Union Street, talks with a customer at the checkout counter of the grocery store in San Francisco, on Dec. 11, 2025.
On Sundays, the questions get bigger and more soul-searching. In September, Viollier asked Cow Hollow: “What is the proudest you have ever felt about yourself or a loved one?” In October: “What is the most fun you’ve ever had?” By November: “What is the biggest opportunity that you have missed out on?” And most recently: “What is your warmest memory?”
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“Some of them are fairly provocative,” he said.
Every now and then, a customer will get so caught up in the back-and-forth that they start to leave without........