I have my own take on this. Many times, I am the person standing there awkwardly waiting for the cashier to finish bagging my groceries. I hate it but I won’t help out even if it pisses off 10 people in line behind me. Here is why:
Grocery stores used to have cashiers and baggers. While one scanned/rang up the order, the other bagged the order.
Grocer stores felt that level of service was too expensive so they canned the baggers and put the responsibility on the cashiers. It is crappy, but it is now their job.
Now, even the cashiers are threatened by “Scan Ur Own” (how clever!) lanes that may eventually eliminate their job entirely. I refuse to use them by the way - same principle.
So, if people are pissed that the lane is slow and it is slow because the grocery store has cut staffing requirements to increase margins then to me that is a damn good thing. Perhaps the major chains will realize that customer service and speed are more important than price and margins. Not likely I know but I can dream.
Um. The reason I won’t start bagging while my groceries are rung up is that I want to be able to watch what it says on the register as the items are scanned.
The store I use is convenient and nice and clean and has pretty good produce and friendly staff…and either a policy of not putting all the ‘sales’ data into the computer or the world’s most incompetent data entry clerk. I cannot remember the last time I’ve had an order go through where I haven’t had to tell the clerk that item X is a Buy One, Get One this week, or that the item in her hand happens to be a half-gallon of milk as she can plainly see while according to the register it is now charging me $17.95 for a potted miniature rosebush. (Actual occurence, two trips ago.)
If I spot these mistakes on the fly, the cashier can cancel the wrong price right then AND I get the item that scanned wrong free for ‘helping them to correct their computer system.’ (hah)
True, I could try to look through the receipt tape AFTER everything is bagged and I’ve paid, and try to spot errors then – but who can remember a zillion items then? (I shop for two households, btw, six adults and two children total, so it’s a LOOOOOT of food.)
And if I did manage to spot an error, then I’d have to go and wait in the customer service line, and then we’d have to dig through the bags to find the items in question…
So, I’m sorry if it adds another minute or two to the average waiting time but I refuse to bag while the order is being rung. After it’s done, and I’ve paid, sure. I’m happy to help bag. But so long as it means saving anywhere from $4 to $25 per week by catching these mistake, I’m going to keep my eye on that register.
Blimey! If you lived in the Uk, you would learn to bag your own groceries or starve! Over here, the idea of the shop bagging your stuff for you is unheard of. If you expected it, the assistant/till person would look at you like you were mad. It’s just not a part of our culture.
The only exception is for elderly/infirm people (my mum is ill with cancer and gets help with her bagging) at least in the bigger supermarket chains. I suspect that in the smaller ones you won’t even get that!
Boy, you Americans sure are cosseted
(Cue “when I were a lad I lived in a cardboard box” oneupmanship etc etc!)
I don’t go to the “bag it yourself” places because it’s too much of a pain in the ass, particularly when you’re shopping alone and the next person’s stuff backs up behind yours. So yeah, I expect my stuff to be bagged at the places I shop. That’s part of why I go there. Like ** StarvingButStrong**, I also like to keep an eye on the prices as they are scanned. If that makes me a bad person, oh well. I can live with it. I almost never shop at peak hours, though, since crowded grocery stores annoy me. Most of the time, I actually shop at Peapod and have thing delivered when I need to do major grocery shopping.
Well, of course folks can make that choice, and we have. It seems the argument is clearly that we go to a gorcery store that presumes to bag groceries for you, but are understaffed so the cashier has to do it. The OP is complaining that the person in line is not bagging their own groceries, but IMO should be complaining that the grocery store is understaffed. What if the delay occured because they had too few cashiers so everyone had to go through one line? Certainly you would mutter under your breath about how the store doesn’t ahve enough clerks.
Baggers? What are these baggers of which you speak?
We just don’t have baggers in stores around here. Occasionally, in the most high-priced gourmet-type groceries, like Kings, there will be baggers. More likely, though, they will have cashiers waiting with no lines and no baggers, so you get out of there really fast. And sometimes I see a few developmentally disabled people working as baggers. But these cases are rare.
It surprises me to hear that bagging “isn’t the cashier’s job.” It seems inefficient to have two people doing the job that just one could easily do. Instead of having 5 registers open and 5 baggers, wouldn’t it make more sense to have 10 registers open? (or 8 or 9, taking into account different costs). Under that system, you could still add baggers (stock people or whatever) to help speed things along if things got crowded.
They just equipped my Pathmark with rotating bag-holding thingies that hold 6 bags at once., so the cashiers can bag as they go. At first the cashiers didn’t seem to like the set-up, but they seem to like it now. The bagging goes very very quickly using these things, and it makes it easy for the cashiers to bag the items in a rational order. There is no opportunity for the customer or a bagger to help bag, as the items go straight into bags as soon as they are scanned. The disadvantage is that they can’t easily be used with paper bags or cloth bags.
But they do have “bag your own” lanes, which I absolutely love, especially if I have a large order. I take the time at the store to bag things in groups according to where they will be put away, and it saves me time at home. I also can use paper, which I like to use part of the time. I don’t bring cloth bags, since I re-use all of the grocery bags that I get, and I appreciate getting them.
Anyway, it really blows my mind to think that anyone would have an objection to helping bag groceries.
I see StarvingButStrong’s comment posted while I was composing mine:
I carefully watch the stuff being rung up, too. My store rarely makes mistakes, but they do happen. There seem to be more mistakes in using coupons. (When they installed the rotating baggers, they also installed really nice screens so it’s very easy to see what’s going on.) I also have to keep an eye out to make sure they don’t bag things that don’t need bagging, like a bottle of bleach. (If I can, I’ll put these items at the front or back of the pile and tell the cashier that I don’t want them in bags.) I wait until the order’s done to bag if I’m in a bag-your own lane. The bag-your-own lane has two “chutes,” though, so I don’t hold the next person up.
I have the same objection that has been mentioned before. I like to watch my items being scanned. I too have noticed that the stores often make mistakes.
I would help bag my groceries after they are done being rung up but by then the cashier is already doing it (unless a bag person has shown up) and I would just get in the way.
For the people who hate waiting in line at the grocery store so much; Most medium sized towns have at least one all night grocery store. Hell, I could go to any of three all night grocery stores all 20 minutes or less from my house. In addition the Super Walmert is open all night. These stores are pretty empty late at night and early in the morning.
I’m so happy others have admitted as much. I hate getting in the way. I usually feel like an akward clunky person to begin with, and so i’m hyper paranoid that I’m always in someones way.
The bags at my grocery store are on the other side of the counter, facing the cashier. It’s rare that there’s no bagger, but on the occasions that there isn’t one…
#1. I’m watching the items on the screen, as others have said #2. By the time the items are done, the cashier has already hopped over there #3. The location of the bags make my “oh shit, i’m in the way” radar go nuts. I’d have to literally, be standing next to the cashier behind the counter. No thanks.
I always go out of my way to make customer service worker’s lives easier, and would never intentionally do anything to make it harder for them. Certainly not out of laziness.
People that don’t bag aren’t necessarily the monsters some people are making them out to be.
Even though they’ve been operational for at least a year - they still strike people by surprise. So you have those who are apparently blind to the 5 people waiting in line and try and cut. (they’re always fun), the people who still don’t quite understand their atm cards. The ones who for some odd reason can’t understand that they need to put their item in the bag. The machine is yelling “please put your item in the bag” the clerk assigned to the station is telling them “put your item in the bag, sir” and they stand, gaping, staring with the stupid item in their hand muttering about how things don’t work. I’ve been in line behind the ones who haven’t yet grasped the concept of scanning… they’re the really scary ones.
Anyway, with the exception of the self checkers, I don’t think there are any grocery stores in the area that aren’t set up so that someone would even be able to bag their own groceries. It’s designed for a bagger or someone who bags as they scan. It would simply not occur to me that I need to bag my own groceries either. To me, that’s odd. It isn’t an objection - but an oversight.
It’s to just stand there watching someone else do a job that you are perfectly capable of doing, even if they are being payed for it. Sure, it’s your right. But it’s still rude.
When I was a cashier, I had no problem bagging things for my customers. They were usually putting their wallet away, or whatever while I was bagging. That doesn’t bug me. But sometimes I’d get someone with a huge amount of stuff that would just stand there looking at me funny while I rushed trying to pack stuff up and keep the line moving. The stuff was within arms reach of him. There were bags on the counter. But he still feels like he should just sit there looking at me with a stupidly while the line piles up behind him for like five minutes. It’s like some people get a sadistic joy out of making people do stupid stuff. Frankly, its a bit humiliating. And the $6.75 an hour I got paid wasn’t enough for me to be okay with being humiliated.
I rarely bag, or have to bag, my own groceries. Quite frankly, I suck at it, and even if I were expert, there are usually many baggers around. This is good, because I really don’t do the bagging thing well at all.
However, if I have my husband or my son with me, they will automatically start bagging (if the store’s busy, and no baggers are around) and they don’t mind a bit.
Anything to hurry things up so they can get back home and finish watching Nascar. Priorities, you know.
I feel that, if the store has bagging service, it should be provided as much as possible to anyone who wishes it. This does not mean that I’m above bagging my groceries and waiting a long time until someone comes to help; I would jump in if no service was available to keep things moving along. However, I would still think it rather irresponsible of the store, as such service is usually provided for thanks to the cost of the items.
[sub]Oh, and if you really like the baggers methods, a dollar tip for carry-out service really makes his/her day (at least it did for me).[/sub]
If bagging groceries is part of the job description, how is it humiliating to you for the customer to expect you to do your job?
Frankly, I don’t get the mentality that thinks service jobs are humiliating. When I was in college and for some time after, I waited tables, I made beds, I mopped floors, I washed dishes, and I cleaned toilets. Never once did I feel humiliated or feel that such work was beneath me. I took pride in what I did and worked hard in order to earn my pay, which was only $5.15/hr. Mind you, this was in the national park system, so I was doing service work in order to fund my hiking and rock climbing, but still. . .
In any event, I’m willing to pay higher prices at Giant which has baggers or pay lower prices at Shoppers Food Warehouse and bagt my own. What amazes me is that Giant has now installed self-check out, so you have the option of paying higher prices AND bagging your own groceries.
Making a bed while some perfectly abled body guy sits there watching you and smirking= humiliating
No amount of money makes it okay to make other people jump through hoops for you. Sure it’s your right. But it’s pretty reprehensible. Especially when you watch somebody do something can do your youself and derive some sort of sick pleasure from the fact that you can afford to make people do your dirty- or even not so dirty- work.
Being from UK I don’t see a great need for baggers. What pisses me off no end is when there are large queues and only a few tills are open each with baggers. Why can’t the baggers opperate the unused tills, that would speed things up much more.
What’s the difference between jumping through hoops and legitimately providing a service, though? Where is that line? Just because someone CAN do something doesn’t mean they necessarily SHOULD do it if they prefer to pay someone else to do it.
You may just not have been truly cut out for service work – which is fine, not every one is. I waited tables, bussed tables, sold school uniforms, and slung pizza over about an eight year period. Based on my experiences in the field, my impression is that your threshhold for humiliation is likely lower than those of service workers who are consistently content in their work. That’s not to say that it’s a personal failing on your part … it’s just one of the different ways people can be wired.
