Yeah, I think it would be very rude to put down a divider and start unloading your own groceries while the person in front of you is still unloading theirs. But I’ve never seen anyone do that.
Putting down the divider and beginning to unload your stuff when the person in front of you has obviously finished unloading theirs? Perfectly acceptable, and perfectly normal.
I’ve never seen anyone argue about who gets to set down the divider. What usually happens in my experience is that once the person in front of me is done unloading their stuff, they will hand the divider back to me (it’s usually up by the cashier, where it’s easier for them to reach it), and I will place it and start unloading my own stuff.
I’ve literally never heard of this “dispute” and I once spent many hundreds of hours observing cashiers and baggers work (industrial engineering) in stores ranging from inner city to suburban to rural.
Yeah, cashier here - I’m not sure I’d call it a “dispute”. For the most part people are cooperative, as we all have an interest in assuring groceries go to the correct household.
I try to keep and extra one or two stashed at my station in case one goes over the side under the candy/junk shelves so I can hand it to the customer rather than have them attempt to drive for the lost one (it can get icky under those shelves).
It happens. It’s not an everyday thing, but I’ve seen it happen when I open a checkstand and pull a line of people in; first person comes to the front of the belt and starts unloading, I start scanning which starts the conveyor belt going, and the person behind them puts down a divider and starts trying to unload their stuff. I usually have to tell them “Don’t do that yet - you’re going to mix your food in with theirs” and it resolves itself in a matter of seconds.
The much worse scenario is when neither party puts down a divider, nobody says anything when I get into ringing up the second order along with the first, the first customer obliviously pays for both, and only when I start ringing up Customer #3 does Customer #2 say “that’s not mine.” Thankfully that’s only happened a few times in my 11+ years of grocery experience, but it’s always a royal pain in the ass to fix when it does happen, and it only happens at the worst possible time for a line to get gummed up.
Right. I don’t want to buy your groceries, and you don’t want to have to go collect your groceries from the store again, so we both want the divider in the right place.
Dividers: I remember the when dividers featured cigarette ads; they were probably given to the store for free. (I’ll have to add another item to that other ‘things i remember’ thread.)
Anyway, my local Aldi’s has a gutter alongside of the belt for dividers. I noticed that most people pull the divider from the gutter, twist in 90 degrees, and put the divider across the belt. The checkout person then has to twist it another 90 degrees and return it to the gutter.
Now I just grab the divider and plop it on the belt, running in the direction of travel. And this DOES bother some people. Whether or not they need to unload a massive amount of groceries (and need every inch of belt space) they turn the divider the “right way”.
I’ve never ever seen this. It wouldn’t bother me, but I would think it something very strange to do. I would also turn it the right way. The dividers are fairly long and putting it that way would take up an awful lot of real estate on the conveyor belt.
As for putting the divider behind my own groceries, I do it all the time. When somebody does it for me, I consider it a nonverbal way of saying please feel free to use the remainder of this shared space, fellow consumer.
I always put a modest angle on the divider, I’ve seen some hollow dividers fail to stop the belt, as the electric eye goes right through the middle, and it ensures some empty space between the two orders. Leaving it lengthwise is definitely too much, though.
Well, I typically shop rarely, and have a lot of groceries when I shop. But my chief complaint is that it means I need to wait another minute before I can start putting down my groceries, not that there won’t be room. There’s infinite room. The belt just keeps moving. (slowly)
I use it but get the argument about it costing jobs. Also, people doing multiple orders should have to go to the back of the line between orders. If you can’t figure out who owes how much for what, the rest of us shouldn’t have to suffer.
I shopped just today. There were no dividers in sight - until I spotted several of them, lying BEYOND the gutter, and well underneath the shelves of stuff they have right beside the belt. I leaned over, grabbed both, and used one to separate my things from the person ahead of me. The person behind me then grabbed the other and used it.
The cashier, when she got to the beginning of my order, grabbed the divider and flung it back into that same hidden area. I wasn’t sure whether she TRIED to put it in the gutter thingy (into which, I admit, it barely fit) and it fell, or she just tossed it directly into the unusable area.
Then, as a cashier, I’m going to say she had poor technique and was a crappy cashier - those dividers help the cashier as much if not more than the customer, and not slotting them properly was just lazy.
I’ve always liked them, but have also always felt like the ones with the weight-checker need to be adjusted to be more forgiving. Nothing more annoying than having it not identify that you put something very light in your bag that’s on the weight-checker, and have it make you wait while some attendant comes over and resets it.
That, and the over-18/over-21 stuff needs some kind of overhaul. I’m 49, and I really don’t like having to wait on the slow-assed attendant to come ID me to buy a can of spraypaint or bug spray, or a six-pack or whatever. Is there a way to let me scan my own ID and then identify me with a camera or something?
I have noticed one thing - do people actually have to read the prompts and take 15 seconds to do so for each one? There’s like 5 words at most on any prompt, and they always say the same thing. After a time or two, they should be on automatic pilot, but no, they’ve got to read each individual word of “Please insert card” by sounding out the letters like a kindergartener or something.
Some people haven’t used self checkout much. Some people have mostly used it at a different store, that has different prompts. The prompts are there because some customers need to read them.
Self-checkout has been around for 10-15 years now, and so have POS card readers. Nobody’s got an excuse for not knowing the general flow of events when using those things.
I discovered there are many, many stores out there that won’t let you use cash at a self-checkout. Right now, this is driving me nuts because if I’m running into a store for a single item, such as a head of lettuce or a bag of chips, I am expected to use a debit card, so the store can track my purchase. But I have the cash. Why must I stand in line at your understaffed checkout to buy my single item? Grrrr.
“The general flow of events” is not nearly good enough to operate the machine. You must respond to each machine’s idiosyncracies in the time and manner it demands.
Some you have to put your loyalty card in first. Others at the end. For some, [Cancel] is on the left and [OK] is on the right, while others are the other way around. Some sneak a “You want to donate $5 to hunger? yes/no” prompt in there at the point in the flow where the others put “Approve your charge of $34.56? yes/no”.
Sometimes the PIN/POS card acceptor is integrated in the main screen; others it’s a separate box. When you get to the point in the flow of paying, many terminals pop up an array of boxes that are really pushbuttons, all shaped like credit cards, that each are labeled “credit”, “debit”, “store card”, “cash”, “voucher”, etc. And no two stores have that array of choices in the same sequence. There’s often not a go-back button on the next screen if you push the wrong thing. So you have to read to find the correct one.
When all self-checkout systems are truly standardized, this’ll get easy-er. But right now each of these takes paying attention to. Every time.
Lastly, as our resident expert @Broomstick says, your fellow citizens are mostly mentally handicapped and struggle with simple tasks requiring actually reading carefully and choosing based on what they read.
Because you have an irrational attachment to an obsolete payment method. It’s probably been 2 years since I last used cash to buy anything, even a pack of gum, at a bricks and mortar store. Wave my card at it and out the door for me.
The war against retailers tracking us has been comprehensively lost. Get over it. Took me a long time to abandon hopes for the Revolution myself, but I’ve now been assimilated. Try it, you might like it.