After finishing my grocery shopping last night I stepped into the express lane because I figured the contents of my basket were well within the regulations of that lane.
Contents:
-A bag of 10 small oranges, not pre-bagged, I actually picked them out and bagged them in one of those clear bags from the roller.
-5 or 6 various single items.
As I’m paying the cashier says, “Since we’re not busy I’ll let you through this lane, but this is more than 10 items.”
The man behind me says, “Yeah, I was gonna say sumthin. Grumble. Grumble.”
The oranges were all the same.
I assume it takes as much time to read the sticker, punch in the code and weigh one orange in a bag as it does for ten.
Anyways…I chuckle, pay and go about my evening, thinking, “Does 10 oranges in one bag count as 10 items, or one item?”
It’s probably a good thing you didn’t have a bunch of grapes! They probably would have thrown you out on your ear.
I can’t believe they wouldn’t count a bag of oranges as a single item.
Oh no it isn’t. And if you buy a bag of rice they have to count the grains individually too. It’s the law*
*Law of jerks that is. People in supermarket lines like to moan; there’s nothing you can do about it. BTW, the sign should say “10 items or fewer” not “…less”, but that’s enough pedantry.
I’ve always figured that anything that can be rung up in one transaction counts as a single item. A bag of oranges sold by weight, therefore, would be one item. As would a six-pack of soda.
If you had a bag of oranges that, for whatever reason, each had to be rung up separately, then yes, you’d be over the item limit.
More to the point, when I worked in a grocery store (10+ years ago at this point), that’s how we interpreted the item rule. However, I’m sure individual stores have different policies; the 10-item rule isn’t federal law, after all.
(Individual stores definitely differ in how they handle overlimit offenders – some stores don’t say anything, some mention it and ring them up anyway. I’ve never seen anyone turned away from the line, though.)
The cashier and the man behind you were both idiots. If the oranges were all in one bag, and were rung up as a single item, then they were, in fact, a single item.
I suppose one way in which they could be considered separate is if they are charged by the unit, e.g. 40c per orange, or $1.00 for three oranges, or something.
But if they were priced by the pound or the kilogram, there’s absolutely no excuse for considering them anything but a single item. And even if they were charged on a per-item basis, how hard is it for the cashier to ring up 10x40c?
Note: i should add that i’m one of those people who really gets irritated when someone who has too many items uses the “ten items or less” register, so if i have no trouble with it, then i imagine that most people wouldn’t.
I actually had a checkout clerk try to make me change lanes because the six-pack of Coke I was buying counted as six items and put me over the limit. Of course, this was only because I’d sicced the police on her a$$wipe of a son for breaking into my apartment and stealing my wallet. I refused to leave, and she eventually checked me out.
I’ve seen people diverted to another register before they unload their cart. I think the store where I usually shop has a policy where it’s 12 items per adult. So, if two adults come to the express line with less than 24 items in one cart, it’s permissible. I’m not positive about this – the less I play express line enforcer, the less frustration I feel afterwards.
Well good. Now I know that I haven’t been oblivious my whole grocery shopping life, thinking I was well within the regs at the express lane, when I was actually making one horrible miscalculation after another.
What stymied me into not automatically thinking the clerk was as smart as a stump, was the dingus behind me agreeing with her.
I clearly see that I was in the presence of two idiots, vice one.
So, is it illiteracy? Did no one comprehend the statement “…not pre-bagged, I actually picked them out and bagged them in one of those clear bags from the roller”? If the oranges are sold by weight, then they are indeed one item, but if the oranges are sold “each,” then they are 10 separate items, regardless of whether deball put them into a bag.
As the cashier works there, and is probably more familiar with the store’s pricing policies, I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he was right and deball was wrong. Unless, of course, our OP can actually verify how the ornages were priced, or whether the cashier weighed them or counted them. (hint: how did he know how many there were?)
Good call Nametag. They were x amount of dollars per pound. I remember that because they were cheaper than the larger oranges, which were sold individually, which, of course, you are right about being a single item. I grabbed 10, because I juice two a day, with other fruits, during the weekday.
I supposed I should have made myself clearer, as usual. I put in the reference so nobody would think it was a pre-bagged bag of Sunkists.
The attention to detail on this board can be most impressive.
A personal experience (involving oranges) and the 10 items or less line:
Bought 5 oranges yesterday at Giant; bagged them myself. Looked at my receipt after checking out and those 5 oranges (5@1/1.98) were counted as one item.
And as a former cashier myself, I considered a bag of the same fruit to be one item. If you had 20 cases of coke, that was one item. Basically, if there was only one scan needed that was one item. However, if you got like 15 different kinds of frozen dinners, then those were 15 items since they may have different prices and we needed to scan each one in for inventory purposes…
Any reasonable person would count a bag of oranges as one item, even if they are priced per orange. It’s just one more key to hit.
Once I was in an express line (the only express line) with a single bottle of aspirin and the lady in front of me had a cart full of groceries and the checker didn’t say a word to her, just let her unload. Other side of the coin.
Agree with just about everyone above that a bag of oranges should be treated as one item.
However, this reminds me of a Carol Burnett sketch I once saw. She was having a real bad day, and walks into a grocery store. She puts a bunch of tomatoes into a bag and goes to the express lane. The cashier refuses to serve her telling her that she has too many items in the bag. “You have twelve tomatoes,” Carol is told. So Carol takes the bag, smashes it a few times on the counter and says to the cashier “One bag of ketchup!”
Just curious, when you went through the next line and got your receipt, didn’t it say at the bottom “X total items”? I would have taken it to the manager and had a word with him or her.
This is related to what Papermache Prince said about being 12 items per adult. Once I went to the grocery store during a very busy time. There were about 15 people in the express lane, 12 items or less. The man in front of me set his hand basket down to hold his place in line while he ran off to pick up a couple more items. What’s worse, this brought his item count to 14. What’s worse, he didn’t just put them all together; he had it rung up as two orders, with a divider separating the last two items from the rest. He paid twice, got change twice, and got two receipts, while only going through the line once. The efficient manner with which the cashier made this transaction made me think he’d seen it before, and I think he acted correctly, because it would have probably taken more time to throw the guy out of line. But boy, did this shopper not realize that he was wasting people’s time by having it rung up as two orders instead of one? It bugged me more because I was getting four cases of soda on sale, and they were two to a customer, so I had to go through the line twice. If I had known you could have two orders, I would have just done that.
My point is that no matter how simple a concept you think “12 items or less” is, there’s always some twist.
The principle at play here is to separate shoppers who dash in for a few quick things from those that have a cart full of groceries. The local lines in my neighborhood have less than 10, 12, 15 and 20 items, depending on the store. These are all just a place to draw a line in the sand. If the store is not particularly crowded I don’t care if you have 30 items stuffed into a hand basket, as long as they process your stuff quickly.
I am as guilty as the next person of getting frustrated by long time spent in lines, but maybe we should all just be a little more patient and tolerant of stuff that is small potatoes in the end. It may not make you feel as good as smashing the cretin in front of you in the back of the head with a frozen dinner, but it’s certain to be less stressful for you in the end. Ask yourself: Is this really the battle I want to have when I am out picking up a few items for dinner?
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