In the checkout line I’m unloading my cart and this little slip of a girl I’ve never seen before starts swinging on the end of the cart. I say “Don’t do that.” She stops. I keep unloading the cart. The little bitch is back. This time she’s attempting a “skin-the-cat” manuver I say “Young lady, please stop that.” I go back to unloadi–
“Young lady, this is NOT your cart, PLEASE do NOT do that!”
And her fucking parents have the cart behind me and they are WATCHING THIS and saying NOTHING like it is perfectly NORMAL and OK for your FUCKING OFFSPRING to be be practicing for the goddamned Olympic gymnastics team on a total stranger’s grocery cart!
So I give her my Glare of Death and the little bitch scampers off to mommy. Which means I can stop worrying about her breaking her neck and me being sued because of fucking irresponsible parents.
THEN we move on to the goddamn bagger! As I have mentioned before, it’s the retarded baggers who actually know what the fuck they are doing. Can someone explain to me how this got to be a job that people of normal intelligence can’t master but someone with the IQ of a tulip can excel at? I told the lady - EITHER plastic OR paper. So she proceeds to use BOTH, plonking a paper bag inside a plastic one and jamming my cart full of this shit.
And if ONE MORE PERSON makes a FUCKING COMMENT about what personal hygiene items I and/or my family uses I will go completely BATSHIT!!!
I HATE grocery shopping! I hate it I hate it I hate it!!!
Oh, I see you’re purchasing “Cotonelle Moist Wipes”. Does someone in your household have hemmeroids?
How do those pads with wings work out for you?
My favorite was the girl who held up my Pillsbury brownies for idiots package (ready to bake, just pop it in the oven) and says “Man, who is that damned lazy??” I pretty much said, “Well, apparently I am. Who is that damned rude?”
I came within inches of using the order divider stick to disembowel the checker at the supermarket the other day.
Checker, scanning tofu: “Wow, are you some kind of vegetarian or something?”
Me, wondering how my dietary perferences are any of his business: “No.”
Checker: “I thought only vegetarians at that stuff. Why would you want that if you eat meat?”
Me, grinding my teeth as the urge to kill rises: “Because I like it.”
We continue through the rest of the order in blessed silence. At this point, he scans my magazine purchases, which are Cosmopolitan and PC Gamer.
Checker, smiling and holding PC Gamer aloft: “Buying this one for your boyfriend, huh?”
Me, wondering how fast they’ll block the exits after I kill this bastard: “No. That’s for me. The other one is for my boyfriend.”
For the record, I don’t have a boyfriend, but I thought the lie was worth it to shut him up without bloodshed. If he’d kept talking, though, I think I would have had to reduce him to his component atoms.
GOD DAMN I HATE CUSTOMERS! No shit. They’re so fucking stupid. They’ll change their dumbass minds about that $27 worth of shrimp they got from the Meat Market and just put it any-god-damn-where. They get an attitude with me when I VERY POLITELY explain that we don’t carry that dumb shit they got in Caracas, Venezuela. They always ask me if we have any boxes (they’re moving). Look birdbrain; we make money by selling shit…and why the hell would we keep boxes lying around? Just so we could give them to dipshits who are too damn cheap to go buy some? (However, I did go find some for a pretty girl. Hey, I’m human)
Broomstick-
I know this is no consolation, but with what cashiers and sackers are paid, it’s unreasonable to expect much.
The worst, the absolute worst price check I ever heard was, fortunately, not for me and mine, but it was awful to witness.
It was not at the grocery store but at a “medical supply” store, a sort of specialty store for disabled people. I was there with a disabled person, who was shopping for their own “special needs” (gack! I think I was just politcally correct - ptui!). The gentleman at the cash register was having his order rung up when the cashier bellows out
“HEY DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW MUCH THE COLOSTOMY BAGS ARE?”
I think everyone in the store wanted the earth to open up and swallow us whole. How in-fucking-sensitive can a person be?
Anyone who has read my posts knows that I am not Mister Happy Fucking Sunshine. I am a 35-year-old curmudgeon who doesn’t like much about his world.
But I LOVE grocery shopping.
It’s one of the most normal things I do. I clip coupons, I compare prices, I check for freshness, and I play by the rules.
My checkers and my baggers are always friendly and solicitous. Sometimes I want to grab them and hire them, but that would be wrong.
I don’t often, at most establishments I patronize, get the service I deserve. But the employees of the Ralph’s that I shop at rock my world. They ask after my cats, they ask how my smoking-cessation (strictly theoretical, presently) is going, and they NEVER insult me by offering me (6 foot, 250 pounds) help with my bags.
I can absolutely empathize with Long D., because I am in the service industry, and I know how frustrating your job can be. But I got a Benjie that says you are a union member, and that you make an above-average wage for a job that involves minimal heavy lifting and strictly indoor work.
And there IS a happy medium. It’s called the Invisible Hand. Ask my good buddy, Adam Smith. He paid off my car, 20 months early.
Broomstick, your other stories were… amusing. The fucking house apes dangling from your cart were the product of the morons pervasive in our society today. The story about the colostomy bags was completely incredible, in the literal sense of the word of “incredible.” It simply did not happen, in a “maedical supply store.”
The fucking megastore near my house is horrible for overcharges. I never shop there for a cartful of stuff (I go to a store that is much more like the one FarmerOak describes) but for quick trips, it’s the Megahumpingstore.
Thanks to the scanner law, any overcharge I catch nets me 10X the overcharge, which is what makes it worth schlepping over to the service desk and doing all the paperwork. Usually they are very cheerful about it. It was their screwup, it’s the law, have some money.
Last week the cunt behind the desk starting giving me a hard time. “If you noticed the overrings while you were having them rung up, the cashier could have just fixed it for you.”
“Right, but I thought one of the points to my coming up here and getting the reward was that it alerted you to change things in the computer before more people were overcharged and more people claimed the reward. It’s a win-win.”
She sneered at me (and my apparent greed) said no, nothing gets changed in the computer, and told me next time to just have the cashier change the price on the spot. Nice, bitch! Apparently your store has figured out that the number of people who will pay the overcharge without noticing or complaining more than make up for the twits like me who insist on the full refund & reward. I suppose the payoff is even better if you can try to cow more people like me into not asking for the refund & reward, eh?
Actually, it’s completely reasonable. The customers aren’t in charge of how much you get paid. If you don’t intend to do the best job possible while you’re at work, then fucking quit. But don’t slack off and punish the customer with subpar service just because you don’t like what your employer pays you.
FarmerOak, you’ve called me wench twice this morning! I think I’m falling in love (truly, it’s my favorite affectionate epithet).
You sound like my kinda guy anyway. To wit: “Anyone who has read my posts knows that I am not Mister Happy Fucking Sunshine. I am a 35-year-old curmudgeon who doesn’t like much about his world.”
Too bad I’m married. We could hitch up and hate the world together, with you doing all the grocery shopping. I’d let you send whatever you save from coupon-clipping to the DNC.
Back to our regularly scheduled Grocery Store rant. Goddamn it, Tomatoes are a vegetable, so why do they always put canned tomatoes in a different aisle, by the spaghetti sauces! If I’m buying pre-made spaghetti sauce, you can be damn fucking sure I’m not also buying tomatoes to make my own sauce.
Broomstick (cool handle btw), this is kinda related to the colostomy bag price check.
The place I pick up my prescriptions is staffed by people who like to yell, “What’s the prescription for?!” at top volume over the counter when they can’t find your stuff right away. I’m not embarrassed about being on birth control, but I don’t think everyone in the downstairs section of Duane Reade needs to know about it. Also I may be going on an antidepressant soon-- although, shrieking, “It’s my PROZAC! I need it NOW!” has some comic potential.
I agree that this is annoying, but let’s face reality - this checkout-person was probably hitting on you, albeit in a clumsy fashion.
I also agree that he probably shouldn’t be hitting on customers, and that in any event, he should have stopped after you answered “no” to his first question.
Nevertheless, please have a little compassion. Most guys start out a little clumsy. Also, consider that there’s a reasonable chance that when Mr. Right approaches you for the first time, he too will make a slightly intrusive series of observations/comments/questions.
