I’m the type of person who frets over having 17 items in the 15 items or less line and yet I do see people will full shopping carts go into the line even when it’s long and they seemingly aren’t refused.
Now I do believe there is an exception to this rule that I’ve seen cashiers actually encourage, if the 15 items or less line has nobody and the “regular” lines are full they will take people from the full lines and cash them out there, but I’m specifically talking when there’s 8 people in line with 10/15 items or less and one other person with 50 items standing with them.
I’ve seen it. The customer was not happy. But when she pulled outta line everyone applauded.
As it happened a woman behind her asked could she go ahead since she had one item and was in a big hurry. The overloaded buggy lady said “Too bad”
Another person pointed her out to the checker. And she called someone to tell her move out of the 10 or less express lane.
Lots of cursing and ‘karen’ mouth. But in the end she moved her buggy and walked out the front door.
It’s been done. But as folks have said, it’s gotta be pretty egregious for the cashier to volunteer to have that argument with the customer. Or it has to be a customer who’s a perennial problem.
I’m sure the cashiers, at least at the corporate places, have been explicitly instructed to not turn away people with too many items. A person willing to flaunt the rule is also a person who doesn’t give a particular shit about what the cashier - or the other people in line - have to say about it, which means arguments and maybe worse escalations if they’re confronted about it.
Better and almost certainly faster to just ring the asshole up and move on.
I have not - but it seems these types of lines have gone away here since the pandemic, yielding to self-checkout. It seems people with fewer items tend to choose to use those, while people with larger numbers utilize the cashiers, who are of course faster at scanning large numbers of items.
Many moons ago I was a supermarket cashier. When running the express check-out, I would not hesitate to inform someone that they are in the wrong line if they are obviously over the limit.
If they are within spitting distance of the cap, I would still ring them up but I would inform them that this lane is for 12 items or less.
I work in a grocery store and we don’t have an express lane, but our self checkouts have an “About 15 items or less” rule. We don’t draw a hard line at 15 and if someone has 20 or 25 items (or a bunch of one or two items) we let them through, but if someone’s obviously got a full cart we turn them away.
It happened to me once. I had about 15-20 items, and most people were in the pre-Thanksgiving two-cart mode. The things was, all the other lines were backed up halfway down the store, and the ten or less was doing absolutely nothing; there was no one there. So I thought, I’ll go in here, we need to spread out the pain.
But no, she was adamant that she needed to twiddle her thumbs until someone came along with 10 or fewer items.
Target stores just set a limit of ten items for their self-checkouts. They present this as a change to improve customer experience but I believe it’s to address shrink.
Ironically, I did see someone turned away for this for the first time that I remember in my entire life at Target this weekend at their self-checkouts. Ironically, because there were no signs up yet. You’d think that all the other times I’ve seen customers at other stores tried to slide in a large order when there were signs, at least one of them would have been denied.
But I must be lucky because I can count on one hand the number of times I remember being behind it, and the maximum was like double the number of items. Still, if you have double the items, at that point surely you should be shunted to another line.
I’ve fudged the express limit by a few items. Especially when there are multiple items. Like 4 cans of soup. Because the cashier only scans once and enters 4.
I agree people way over the limit should be sent to the regular checkout…
I can’t recall a cashier saying anything to a customer. But I’m sure someone with a full cart would be asked to change lanes.
Working in a store I have at times even been the Enforcer.
As you noted, if the regular lines are full and the “or less” items aren’t being used we’ll re-route some traffic over to them to help move customers through the check out process, but that’s an exception to the usual rules.
Another exception is being using “shop and scan” or using purchasing apps where they might have a full cart but only need to scan a code on their smartphone to finish the transaction, so it looks like they have a massive amount to ring up but they don’t and can quickly move through the transaction area.
Well… it’s not worth quibbling if someone it just one or two over the limit. But egregious violators will be confronted. We might boot that up the management ladder for more authority, though. Depends on the circumstances.
Ha-ha-ha - you so funny. It’s not constant but I would describe it as “rare”. Then again, I spend a lot more time in a store, and a lot more time by the registers, than most people.
Nitpick (seemingly needed in all such threads) - “fewer” please.
Never seen anyone moved, nor have I said anything. I always imagine if someone is rude enough to violate the posted rule, I don’t want to have they direct their rudeness towards me. I’d rather waste the couple of minutes it takes, than to experience that unpleasantness.
I had 4 items. I was thinking out loud and noticed the woman in front of me seemed to be way over the limit. I said, without meaning, “How many items does she have?”. She heard me. She got mad. She turned around and growled “Yeah, how many have you got?”. I smiled and said “I think I have four. Let me count- one and one and one and one is four, right? Let me be sure. Two plus two is four right? And four is less than 10, right?”
You could see her fuming as she shut her mouth and turned back around. It was one of the happiest moments of my life.