Look, I know I’m an over-analytical hand-wringer who takes 15 minutes to pick out a clock radio, but the fucking sign says 10 items or less in the fucking express lane and you’re buying enough groceries to feed a small army of crying brats like the one in your cart trying to destroy everything in arm’s reach. You are angering the gods of Target! And don’t think they don’t know! They’ve got cameras everywhere.
And why that hapless little woman behind the register didn’t throw you out of the line to stew in your own private little too-many-item hellzone, I will never know.
I was once chastised by the clerk for having too much stuff at a 15 items or less line. My question was - if you have 5 loose apples, is that one item or five? What if you put them in a bag (bad for the enviroment)? What about a bag of Cheerios? I try to honor the spirit of the line, but if I have put a number of items in a basket, I may not know how many there are, and I do not want to crush stuff by rooting around and counting.
If they are not connected (by a bag, tie, string or box) they are separate. THis bugs the crap out of me and I always make a point of saying something since the checkers arenot allowed to do anything under penalty of termination.
When I’m at the Target in the rich neighborhood I usually will ask the cashier “Isn’t it amazing how people can be so wealthy as to live around here but not be able to read a sign” or " I wish I was so important that I could just ignore the rules of common decency".
If I’m in a particularly bad mood I will just ask the person directly why they are in the line when it is clear they should not be.
In that case, use the line where they don’t care how many items you have.
I would say it depends on how the items are priced.
If they’re priced per item, each item counts separately. If apples are $.50 each, five apples are five items.
If they’re priced by weight, they’re all one item. If apples are $1 per pound, five apples is one item. But if you’re getting them counted as one item, you do have an obligation to make sure they all get to the checker at the same time, either by putting them in a bag or putting them together on the checkout counter. If you can’t be bothered to do that, they’re separate items.
Can someone point me to the official list of rules, particularly for Safeway? I just wish they had more tellers as I get groceries almost everyday and the lineups have been getting much longer.
Although I am actually quite careful not to have too many items, I have long lived by the thought that “I do not line up to pay money to businesses.” So that can mean changing stores or grumbling a lot.
“10 items or less” is fine. (So is “10 items or fewer”.)
I was recently in a store – and I can’t remember which one – that had a lane marked “around 10 items,” which I thought was an elegant compromise, both from an English usage standpoint and from an “I counted 11 items in your basket” standpoint.
Can we pit the companies that don’t bother to enforce it as well? Would it be so terrible to let the staff say “I’m sorry sir, but this is the 10 items or fewer line. I can’t serve you here.”
If I find myself in line behind someone who is obviously abusing the express lane, and the checker does nothing about it, I will sometimes start loudly counting each time the scanner beeps.
…17…18…19…20…21…
I totally enforced it at my first job, but at Kmart, it was like the above-we weren’t allowed to enforce it. And the sucky part was that the express lane didn’t have the extra long counter.
Fucking customers.
Loose apples don’t count as they’ll most likely be weighed together.
I was once in front of someone who sarcastically said, “Gee, I thought this was the EXPRESS lane,” and I loudly counted out each item as I put it up to be scanned. I had one less than the limit, which was 15.
I just wish they had more tellers as I get groceries almost everyday and the lineups have been getting much longer.