Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
Nadine Clocksin knows peoples’ names, their families and gives hugs. As she prepares for retirement from the store where she’s worked for decades, customers are lining up to thank her and wish her well in retirement.
Nadine Clocksin, 76, has been working at the Albertsons on Hilyard Street and 30th Avenue in Eugene since shortly after its opening in 1990. That’s 36 years.
She says she still remembers memorizing item codes to punch into registers before bar-code scanners existed.
She also remembers having to painfully memorize them all over again, every time the codes inevitably changed.
“I still can slip in a code once in a while, because it’s faster,” Clocksin said with a wink.
She’s a familiar face to many, and a role model and friend to even more.
This week marks her last handful of shifts at the register, where she gives hugs to shoppers at the south Eugene supermarket.
Clocksin says she loves her job. So much so that she decided to push her retirement back a day to pick up a shift for a co-worker.
Her final day is Friday, June 26, and a steady stream of customers has been coming in to visit her, said her boss, Emily Westman.
“People come through all the time and just talk about how wonderful she is, like no matter what time of day it is,” Westman said.
Liz Williams, a retired kindergarten teacher, has been shopping at the Albertsons on Hilyard Street for 30 years. She’s known Nadine for nearly 25 of them.
She says when Clocksin is at a register, people purposely wait in her line even if it’s longer than others because she knows people by their first name, and makes everyone feel welcome and included and has the best hugs.
“Albertsons should start a Nadine day, no doubt about it,” Williams said. “We need more people like her.”
For her co-worker, Leta Rolfson, Clocksin has been a prominent role model in her life since she was in high school. Rolfson is now married and has a son who is in high school, and says Clocksin has been there every step of the way.
“She views customers as friends and family,” Rolfson said. “She takes time and energy to get to know them, asking about their families, remembering if they went on a trip or who might have graduated.”
Williams, in collaboration with her friend Mary Fuller, have tried to promote Clocksin’s retirement via a Nextdoor post, so that customers who know her well can say their goodbyes, and put thank-you cards in a box they’ve put at the customer service counter.
“She’s not just a body,” Rolfson said, wiping tears from her eyes. “She’s not somebody who’s going to be replaced.”
Clocksin said she plans on spending more time with her family and visiting, with her husband, her eldest son in Oklahoma.
There she’ll get to see her great-granddaughter, whom she hasn’t seen since her birth.
On her last day Friday, you’ll find Clocksin at the same spot where she’s served so many customers: Register 5.
