Why can’t people wait 5 seconds for me to pocket my change, place bills in wallet grab my bags and get the fuck out the way before they start shoving their shit up on the counter and nudging me aside? :mad:
I got two hands…one with a wallet, one with a receipt, change and cash, none are available to grab the bag off the counter, until one of those hands are clear. :rolleyes:
in my experience, on big shopping days like thanksgiving, christmas, etc, you have to do that for the customers to understand that you’re closing. you can make all the signs you want, shut off the doors, turn off the lights, and people will keep shopping. you can make closing announcements, and they will keep shopping. they will push open the automatic doors if they’re unlocked and grab a cart. you have to actually have a physical barrier or a person standing guard to make sure no one else comes in. you should’ve been let in without an issue 10 minutes before closing for sure, but i definitely understand why they go to those lengths to close up.
In June of 1974, just before I joined the Army, I was working in a big grocery.
The date, June 8th, was significant because eight years before that, to the day, a huge tornado ate it’s way through our fair city.
So I’m working along and the sirens go off. This is not a drill. An announcement is made of the tornado warning. We don’t have shelters, but other stores do, so folks are asked to leave. We clerks are to throw our tills in the safe and bolt across the street to a restaurant that can accomodate us.
Shoppers get mad when we won’t check them out before seeking shelter. And when the manager makes a final sweep through the store before leaving he finds a guy wandering around who asks “Where’s the strawberry jam?”
When you’re responsible for counting all the money at the end of a shift you learn to appreciate those cashiers who leave a minimum of change in their tills. Especially dimes. I hate dimes.
My husband was doing this- 25+ items in a 10 or less checkout. I will give him some leeway, as neither of us is a native French speaker and he has a harder time with it than me.What I will not do is continue to let him do that once I have translated it for him (also, the number 10 is in digits- it was a fair freaking guess that it referred to items, wasn’t it? Or am I a bitch?).
My wife would scream at me if I did that (and she’s generally soft-spoken). I would hope she’d also wrestle the cart out of my hands and push it over to a regular checkout lane, over my unconscious form if need be.
You should have been a bitch.
It would be more convenient to pay for takeout food at the counter, but some stores have policies against employees handling both food and money. There may also be issues with pay; people who handle money are classified as one job at one rate of pay, while people who handle food are classified as another at a different rate of pay and changing that would be more trouble than it’s worth for so few people.
That said, I agree that supermarkets that offer ready-made food would do well to have one dedicated line just for takeout purchases, at least during the meal rush periods.
Walmart and other big stores wait too long to gather their carts from the parking lot. Since the rear wheels have to slide sideways over the pavement when a long train of carts is moved, most of their carts’ rear wheels have serious flat spots on them. This makes the cart the cart annoying to push as it goes whacka whacka whacka down the aisle.
I’ve heard some locales have four-wheel caster carts. Anybody know where?
When I lived in Vienna four castering wheels was the norm. Made it much easier to maneuver in narrower isles.
And if something comes in a bag already.
Trader Joe’s, for one.
I have a theory on the “change piled on top of the bills” thing.
Back in the day when I was in retail (I’m 50 - and get off my lawn!), manually-operated, and even some early electronic cash registers did not give you the change amount. You had to figure it out and the standard for returning the change was to “count it back” to the customer:
“Your total is $13.17, Mrs Shlabotnick. A twenty? Thank you. (mental figuring or a calculator if you were truly desperate and they gave you the dreaded penny…lol) Here’s your change - 83 cents makes it $14, and $1 is $15 and $5 makes $20. Thanks for shopping at Krabfelters…have a nice day”.
Cumbersome, yes, but the change always landed in the palm first, followed by the paper money. Now with these new-fangled ee-lectronic machines, the necessity to do all of this is gone and it’s just pile the change on top of the dollars.
Another thing that bugs me is if I am holding out my hand for the receipt, please don’t put it in my bag.
UT
Based on this morning’s excursion: Make (reasonably) sure you have sufficient funds in your EBT account for the lollipops and Slim Jims you’re getting for your drooling brood.Yes, I know this is a gross mischaracterization of the vast majority who are doing their best to feed their families using their food stamp / EBT benefits. But not only were these people using an EBT card to buy junk food — which torques me enough all by itself — but even after the cashier told them how much short they were, they had to stand there and agonize over what to turn back.
My own damn fault, I suppose, for waving them ahead of me. At least I wouldn’t have been among the inconvenionced.
Yeah, I’m a big fan of the self-checkouts. Except when:
and yes, lazy assfucks leaving their carts wherever the hell they feel like. the “best” was when I was leaving Meijer; I was in my (running) car with it in reverse, and this whale of a bint who had just finished loading her car a few spaces down decided she only wanted to take 10 steps and left her cart behind my car. My running car with the reverse lights on. I jumped out, grabbed the cart, stormed past her and shoved it in the corral. She pretended not to hear me when I snarled “was that so damn hard?”
Ok, but in Safeway, when you put their very own supplied right there paper bag down, it freezes and says “unexpected item in the bagging area”. Riiight. A bag, in the bagging area is unexpected.:rolleyes:
And right there on the screen is a button that says “I’m using my own bag.” :dubious:
“when you put* their very own supplied right there paper bag* down”. Thus, ipso facto, I am not "using my own bag".
Our local supermarket has parent and child spaces, with extra wide room so you can get the carseat/stroller in and out. Great! The only problem is, the nearest cart corral is at least two aisles of spaces away from them. So you get back with a full cart of shopping and your baby, unload it all into the car, then abandon your car with your baby inside while you walk a not insubstantial distance away to return your trolley? Umm, no.
I do try to be as considerate as possible - there’s a covered walkway alongside the parent spaces that even when you ditch your trolley there, still has room for another trolley to pass, and yes, the workers seem to patrol it regularly to collect our abandoned carts, but hey, if they’d actually put a corral nearby I wouldn’t have to do it in the first place.
I put the change on top of the note to weigh it down. Believe it or not, I’ve had customers who apparently cannot close their hand on their change with managing to drop the notes, followed by a glare as though somehow I’m blame. Coins on top holds the note down so the apparent freakish localised gusts of wind can’t sweep the notes from those slow-hand-closing customers.
It’s a deliberate choice to give them to you that way. It’s not that I’m too stupid to do basic mathematics without the register.
Well I guess what I would do—fuck the hypothetical, what I do—is unload the groceries in the car, then wheel the cart and the baby over to the return. Leave the cart, keep the baby (make sure you don’t get that one backwards), and carry the baby back to the car.
That is, unless you’re one of those parents who can’t seem to bear to carry their infant anywhere, no matter how short the distance. Everytime I see a pumpkin seat with a 20-plus-pound kid in it being carried into our daycare facility, I can only roll my eyes. Is a handle really worth an extra 10 lb of seat?! But this rant is quickly going on the wrong tangent.
Judgmental? Who, me?