Agreed!!! I definitely vote this as being a dick move. Pick a fucking line & stay in it. By going into two different lines you’re misleading others who are wanting to get into a line based on the number of people in the line & the number of items they’re buying.
In my family we would never do this because we consider it is rude. Not everyone feels this way. Etiquette isn’t just about your own personal opinion. If a behavior offends a sizable fraction of the population (but not you), that is good reason to consider the feelings of others. The poll results, currently at 40% opposed to doing this, indicate it is inappropriate.
Etiquette is also a question of common practice, of course, the idea that even where principles are completely arbitrary, if we all follow the same principles things are fair.
And I honestly can’t remember ever seeing anyone do this in such an egregious way that I noticed.
I had to think about this one a bit, but I’m going to have to come down on “not dickish”, and possibly even the opposite of dickish. It’s beneficial to them, certainly, but there’s nothing wrong with that. The measure of dickishness is in the impact on others. And what is that impact? When they figure out which lane is faster, someone gets out of the slower lane. Speeding up the slower lane is a good thing, not a bad one. You get the best results when all lanes are the same speed, and this couple is doing their part to make that happen.
There’s one store near me that has gotten rid of them, too, but others that haven’t. I wonder if it’s a coming trend, or just that one store choosing a different way of doing things.
I think it could be an urban/suburb thing. The self-checkout lines are great when only buying a few things. I suspect they’re more heavily used in places where people live close to the store and make frequent trips. If someone does the shopping for a family of four for a week, and buys enough to fill the trunk of their car, the self-checkout probably doesn’t get used as much.
I suspect the problem is that there’s a scale under the bagging area. I’ve always figured it was an anti-theft measure; if you scan a can of soup and the scale detects ten pounds put in the bag, that’s a problem. It also means that if you bring your own bags, or rearrange things while you’re scanning, the computer has to ask for help. Eh, you get used to it.
Even if you don’t use them, they’re to your benefit. The stores I’ve seen have three or four self-checkout lanes overseen by just one person. That frees up checkers to work the other lanes for the people who need them.
Given that completing the sale (payment, processing, handing over the receipt) takes just as much time for a small order as it does for a large order, there’s a gain in efficiency in their combining the orders. I’d guess that they saved the slow line about 15-30 seconds and added 5-10 seconds to the fast line.
Not at all dickish. I think grocery stores should figure out a way to have a single line as most other places do now, so implementing the policy on a small scale is a Good Thing.
I understand the distinction you are making in the first paragraph but firstly it’s not actually a consensus even on that general side of the argument last I looked, and second some posts specifically said holding a place in line per se was not acceptable.
You lost me completely on the second paragraph.
These things aren’t going to be ‘proved’. IMO it’s fine to hold a place and even add items more than one thing somebody forgot. The argument about ‘zero sum, somebody has to be inconvenienced’ doesn’t strictly hold because the pair of people coming to the store is a pair of people, they are spending more person-minutes shopping.
Again if it was somebody on line with a couple of items then a companion rolls over a cart with 100 more, OK I see that point. But adding people/items to your ‘group’s’ place on line, I don’t see that as out of line. But people can’t agree on everything. 
I was just kidding in the second paragraph. But I was envisioning a situation where somebody behind me who lined up with just a few items had a friend roll up with a full cart. Following their etiquette, I could add the groceries of everyone behind them to my own, allowing everyone behind them to jump back ahead of them. (While comparing them to Nazis.)
You don’t really think that’s what happens.
Do you?
mmm
Or the store manager fires a couple of checkers, which would lower the store’s payroll costs, which would make the groceries cheaper.
Regardless of exactly how it plays out, The self-checkout lanes increase the overall throughput of the store (all other things being equal), which helps even those customers who don’t use the self-checkout. It would be interesting to measure the productivity gains; how many customers can 5 checkers (for example) process per hour now compared to 30 years ago, despite how many more product and payment options there are.
An armload? That’s a new one for me. I have trouble even really imagining it. How do you hold more than a couple groceries in one arm without dropping them? They don’t stack like books.
My experience with shopping is that most people use carts, and a few people may use the baskets. If you really go in for one or two things, maybe you’ll not bother with either but that’s it. Then again, I’ve always in a more rural area where most people shop weekly or less often.
Since I don’t really have an idea of how much trouble it would be for them to get ouf of one line and into another, I can’t really answer for sure. I do agree with the idea that people size up the line to see which one to get into, and thus it’s kinda misleading. And I sympathize with people who are just completely anti-cutting.
But the main issue I see for “dickish” is just how much inconvenience it puts on everyone else. The main thing I notice about the story from the outset is that they seemed to only be thinking about themselves.
Line jumping is still line jumping regardless of how it’s done. I wouldn’t use this app precisely because it endorses crappy entitled behavior. The stores promote Black Friday rampages too, and we all know what a class act those are.
There is certainly some maximum number of groceries one can walk with without being in fear of dropping them. This is an armload. Q.E.D.
Except there is nothing “entitled” about it.
There’s definitely a difference between the behavior in the OP and utilizing an order-ahead app.
Using one of those apps is exactly identical to, say, calling the Chinese or pizza place down the road to order takeout. If anything, it’s easier for the employees since they don’t have to talk to the customer on the phone - an experience that can be intensely irritating.
I think it’s kinda dickish. If both people had an armload of goods, the one person in the other line joining mine could add substantially to the amount of items between me and sweet, sweet freedom. Also, while the OP didn’t stipulate it, if it turned out that those items were being purchased in separate transactions that’s the same as having an extra person cut in front of me.
I probably wouldn’t pitch a fit about it, but such a situation has the potential to turn even more dickish if there were other circumstances. For example, if I were three decades older and were using a cane or had some sort of obvious disability, that’d be an incredibly shitty thing to do, and would probably warrant saying something.
Do you realize how quickly that line would move if everyone used the call ahead app? It could easily be argued that the ones not using the call ahead app are the ones being rude.
Yes, it could be argued that online/call-ahead pre-ordering is analogous to issuing those little number tickets that put you in line without having to physically stand in line, and allow everyone to be virtually on line and get on with something else without having to actually stand there. And that’s obviously a good thing, so long as everyone understands the system.
I think the source of annoyance here might be the lack of transparency in the length of the line when some people are only virtually present. That is addressed in traditional number-ticket systems by displaying “now serving XXX”. For obvious reasons, Starbucks is never going to put up a sign saying “we’re going to prepare 10 call-ahead orders that we received before yours”. But that’s on Starbucks, not the people who placed the orders.
I voted it wasn’t dickish and then thought about it further and almost immediately wanted to change my answer. If I were behind someone with a small a mount of groceries and then when they were on deck their spouse showed up with a full cart I would be annoyed. Is it the end of the world? No but it would piss off the people off behind them.