As I mentioned once before, I work in a very large and very popular grocery store, which for the purposes of this thread I shall call The Busiest Grocery Store In The World (TBGSITW, or Tibgassitaw’s if you will). I like my job - it pays well, the benefits are good, it keeps me busy, and for the most part our customers are easy people to work with.
However, as I mentioned before, some of our customers seem to act like they just escaped from North Korea an hour ago, and have no concept of “food” which one can “shop” for and “purchase” with “money”, nor even any concept of how to behave in a social setting. Today’s tale is about one specific group of shoppers - people who can’t control their dang kids.
I realize that kids don’t necessarily have the best social skills (being as they’re kids, and all) and that taking them shopping can be an important way to teach them how to behave in public. That only works, however, if you pay attention to them. I can’t keep track of how many times i’ve seen kids running around unattended, sticking their hands in things that hands don’t go into, knocking fragile products off of shelves, or almost getting killed because they don’t pay attention to their surroundings and try to run right in front of a moving forklift. (It’s a good thing those things can brake on a dime, let me tell you.) Our particular tale this evening is about one such group of undersupervised minors that I found myself on the receiving end of today.
I worked a 9-hour cashier shift today, and towards the end of my shift I had a father in line with three pre-teen children. All were very happy as I started to ring up their order, which included a surprising amount of bulk candy. You see, Tibgassitaw’s has a very large bulk section, with hundreds of bins of candies and spices and baking goods and pet foods and cereals and what-not which can be scooped into plastic bags and bought by the pound, the price per pound being prominently displayed on each bin. This particular party had loaded themselves up liberally with bulk sweets, including seven large bags of Jelly Bellies ($6.88/lb, for the record). I commented on it to the father as I rang up a bag entirely of the buttered-popcorn Jelly Bellies which rang up to about $35 in and of itself, and he commented that it was a special occasion for the kids and they were celebrating. Quite a celebration indeed, I thought to myself as I rang up the rest of his order and presented him with a total of $377 and change.
The man only had $150 on his debit card.
:smack:
As the three people in line behind him watched in frustration, he picked through his scanned items handing me the things he’d decided he could do without (and on a sidebar, when people go overbudget at the register, they always start handing back the vegetables and staples first before they part with any of their precious sweets.) After giving me back probably half of his cart, his total stood at just under $300. The man was confused. Why was his total so high, he asked me, when he had so little left in his cart?
“Well, those bags of candy you have are most of it,” I told him. “The Jelly Bellies themselves are about $100 altogether.”
The man said he had no idea how expensive it was because he hadn’t picked it out. And that, my friends, was when all was revealed - this man had allowed his three preteen kids to load up the cart with whatever they wanted out of the bulk candy section, without paying any attention to the price.
Whatever celebration the kids were having, rest assured, Dear Reader, that it has been cancelled. Over the next ten minutes, I, the customer, and my supervisor picked through his order taking out anything remotely sugary and re-weighing it to be voided out, then adding his staples and veggies back onto the bill, the customers still in line behind him aghast at how much food was being wasted.
Yes, wasted. You see, under state health department rules and HACCP guidelines, once a bulk food item has been removed from its bin and handled by a customer, we can no longer guarantee that it hasn’t been adulterated, improperly stored, or otherwise rendered unfit to touch Christian lips. We can’t even donate it to the food bank like we do with some unsellable products, because it’s not in a factory-sealed package. So anytime a customer abandons a bulk item or decides they don’t want it, all of that product has to be thrown out and the store takes a loss on it. Two hundred and fifty dollars worth of bulk candy, including the delicious Jelly Bellies, had to be taken to the back, counted out, recorded, and tossed directly into our trash compactor to be crushed into a cube with the expired meat, rotten bananas, and broken jars of liquid smoke that were probably shatted by some other kid whose mother was too busy to pay attention to.
The mood of the party as they left the store was much less jubilant than when they had entered my line. I seriously hope that father punishes those kids to the full extant of the law, lest they grow up and themselves become the parents of kids who are allowed to run wild at the store. I shudder to think what my father would have done to me if i’d pulled something like that, and if it were up to me i’d have them mowing lawns for the next year and a half to make up enough money to pay for the goods they destroyed.
On the plus side, the customers who’d been left waiting behind this party for 15 minutes were completely understanding and weren’t mad at me or Tibgassitaw’s at all. I told one of them “See, this is why i’m not a parent” and she laughed.
(End rant)
