Tonight I was at the store, because they had a sale on Oreo Cookies only $1.99 ALL KINDS.
Anyway I get my two packages and go to the “Ten Items Or Less,” line and right in front of me is a lady, she got to have at LEAST fifty items. So I had to go into this line to see how she’s gonna do this. Or will she care.
The cashier says “Ma’am this is the ten items or less line.”
The lady looks at her and says “I got five kids with me, just ring up ten items for each kid and I’ll pay seperately.”
I really had to laugh. I must admit waiting in line has never bothered me but I could see some people pop a blood vessel.
The cashier just rolled her eyes at the lady and rang her up in one big order.
Any other good “Ten items or less” line stories you’d like to share.
(Or 15 items or less or whatever you have in your local area)
When I was in a student share house, we’d line up two bulging trolleys in the regular lane, and one guy would run groups of items through the 12-or-less lane in rotation, we often got down to one trolley only before we got to the checkout.
Once when I was shopping I was pushing my half-full cart (with definitely more items in it than the express line permitted) past the empty express lane. The checker there called me over and said that since there was nobody in line she’d ring up my order. Not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I shrugged and started unloading my cart.
Of course you know what happened next. Almost immediately someone with only a few items got behind me and started complaining about people who can’t read signs. Fortunately, the checker explained why I was there, so I didn’t feel like a complete ass.
I used to be a manager at a grocery store. One day, a man came up to the customer service desk with a complaint. Apparently the young man that was cashiering on the 10 items or less lane didn’t appreciate people with more than 10 items coming through his express lane. He was charging people 50 cents extra if they had too many items!!!
Once my husband and I were at a very busy grocery store with a handbasket containing about 15 items.
He ( being one that takes rules very seriously ) got in one of the regular lines behind 4 completely full shopping carts. I suggested that we get another basket, split the groceries, and both check out at the express line.
He resisted, insisting that it would be “cheating”, but I finally got him to see it my way after he realized how slowly the regular lines were moving.
But he insisted that we pretend we didn’t know each other while we were in the express line and when I started talking to him I swear he got nervous and broke out in a cold sweat.
I got in the “10 Items or Fewer” lane last week with nine items in my basket. A woman got in line behind me holding only a container of ice cream. She looked at my cart, and very snottily informed me that “The sign says less than 10 items, you know”.
Errr…yes, it does. 10 or fewer. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9…I have nine items.
“Oh, come on…you know what they mean. This line is only for people with one or two things”.
I’m still wondering if those “things” she was talking about were brain cells.
I seem to remember that one grocery store where I used to shop had separate lines marked 10 items of fewer and 20 items are fewer (or something like that - I may be off on the exact numbers), which always struck me as a bit odd.
I confess, I went through the 15 items or less lane with more than 15 today.
But the store was pretty empty. The line was empty and I asked the cashier if I could. And no one came in behind me until I was just signing the credit slip. So I guess no one cared.
Once I went through the express line when I counted my 12 little cans of cat food as one item (21 items). The cashier told me never to do that again so I haven’t, I learned my lesson.
In my defense: Many times I’ve let people with only 1 or 2 items get in front of me on the line when I have 9 or 10.
I once went through the express lane with 2 6-packs of Pepsi, but right when I got to the cashier I undid the packaging first so I had twelve items…just to defy authority.
There should be an extra charge for having too many items. This would be automatically handled by the computer and would make enforcement much easier. There could be a notice underneath the item limit sign, e.g. “10 items or less, 20 cent fee for every item over limit”.
I’ve done this a few times - I just tell the cashier “I’ve got 6 of these” (identical cans of soup or whatever). They scan one item and hit “6” on their machine. It doesn’t slow things down. I certainly wouldn’t do it if I had a bunch of different items though.
Fruits and veggies (stuff sold by weight) I have no issue with that at all - a single apple versus a bag of 20 apples is weighed and billed the same way.
I found this to be annoying: In line for one of four open express lanes, all of which have one person getting rung up and at least one person waiting. I have three or four items in my hands. Woman looks at me with pleading eyes and I gesture for her to go ahead right as she simultaneously says, “Do you mind? I only have one item,” in an exasperated tone. Like it wasn’t fair that all these people were in the express line holding her up when she only had the one thing, like we did it on purpose. Like of all of us with only a few things, she was specialer, and most deserving of going first because she only had one thing… If I’d realized she was an entitled idiot, I would’ve said, "Sorry, I’m late for (compelling lie - chemotherapy? - here)… " and let her stew.
As an ex-Walmart cashier (Well, back then it was “Wal-Mart”), I can attest that our policy was that you couldn’t actually refuse to check people out at the express lanes. My best workaround was “I’ve got a small counter and bagging station here, it would be faster for you to go to a regular line”.
My record in volume was two shopping carts of groceries, over 200 items. ::sigh::
Screw that, every single piece of fruit counts as a single item. Take that, The Grapist!
Once I was standing in a kind of long line at a convenience store. The woman behind me asked if she could cut ahead of me. “I’m only buying one thing”, she explained. “Me too”, I said as I held up my one item. She was clearly bothered at how I was being really unfair to her.
Firmly clenches down her teeth on the urge to scream “Fewer!”
I worked as a cashier at a grocery store in high school, and one of the things that would drive me nuts was being on an express lane, having people come through with more than 15 items, and not being allowed to do anything about it.
For the “I have X amount of this item” thing: some registers require a minimum amount before they’ll let you do that; otherwise you have to scan a number of barcodes equal to the number of items, which **does **take time. (Our registers were like that–I don’t remember what the minimum was, but it was high enough that we constantly had people coming through who had multiples and didn’t understand why I was scanning the one they handed me over and over again.)
There’s also the bagging issue–express checkouts are **not **set up to deal with the same volume as regular ones. Even if you’re “not making it take any longer” by ringing up by quantity, it’s still going to be an extra hassle for the cashier to bag, and it’s still going to take longer to bag than an order that’s actually within the stated limit.
The closest grocery store to my work has “15 items or fewer Express Lane” placards on 3 out of the 5 checkout lanes, and often there are only express lanes open. I’m just waiting for someone to give me shit so I can gesture to the other lane and point that out.