In "A&P," Sammy has a poor attitude towards others overall. He looks down on most of the customers in the store and thinks terrible things about them that suggest he finds them dumb and inferior to himself. One of the most significant lines that reveal his attitude comes at the start of the second paragraph. He is ringing up a middle-aged woman at the cash register, and she gets annoyed that he trips up by ringing up an item twice. He then explains,

By the time I got her feathers smoothed and her goodies into a bag—she gives me a little snort in passing, if she'd been born at the right time they would have burned her over in Salem.

His use of the word feathers here and his reference to Salem compare this woman to both a bird and a witch. He clearly does not like people like her and takes out his frustration by degrading them in his thoughts. There seems to be no filter to his critiques and no awareness or concern for thoughts that are inappropriate and cruel. For instance, recall how he referred to some female shoppers as “house-slaves in pin-curlers.” Comments like these suggest that Sammy is angry about his job and with society in general. He seems to think that he is different from these people and somehow better. This attitude really comes across when he tells Lengel he quits and commits to the act even when Lengel tries to talk him out of it. Of course, when he leaves the store, he realizes he is not really all that special and that life is going to be really difficult from now on.