Ha, not me but I did have a similar thing happen once. I had a full cart and the regular checkout lines were backed up, and all of the self-checkouts were open, so the girl monitoring the self-checkouts waved me down and started helping me check out my full cart at the self-checkout. Well naturally, as soon as we start, then the self checkouts start filling up and then people are giving me nasty looks because I’m checking out a full cart and holding everyone up.
Maybe I should just start sending my wife to do the grocery shopping.
Can we extend this idea to convenience stores and lottery tickets? It infuriates me when I go into 7-11 to by a Super Big Gulp, and have to wait in line for ten minutes while several people are buying their lottery tickets. They should have their own damn line so the rest of us can get in and out.
The guys in the liquor store are always larger than I, it would not be safe to quote someone on the Dope, “A lottery is a tx on people who are not good at math.”
Theoretically, I like the do-it-yourself appraoch—but yeah, in my experience those self-checkouts just have too many ways of turning out to be more of a hassle than they’re worth.
If something won’t scan, I lay it aside. The gizmos are supposed to be quick, not a pain in the ass.
One thinks that they would figure it out, but a bottle of spaghetti sauce w/o the back label was back on the shelf the next day. Come to think of it, I shouldn’t have bought something without some of the labeling.
The self-checkout lanes (6) at my Wal-Mart won’t accept any of my cash (Where’s George stamps, you know). So I have to use people-manned checkouts.
The lines are long? Find one of the clerks standing around and tell them to open another checkout lane. It’s amazing what a little yelling can do. Since I was the instigator of this action, I get to go to the head of the line. Wanna make something out of it? I don’t carry this beefy cane for support, you young whippersnapper!
Unlike Rodney Dangerfield, I get a lot of respect at WalMart now.
Are you 106 years old? Do honestly believe that supermarkets don’t have cart wranglers anymore? And that old-timey cashiers didn’t just give back whatever change the non-computerized cash register told them to?
Nope. Not making it up and I don’t think they’d let me within cooee of Vaucluse or Toorak.
My experience today (unrelated to the above complaint) pissed me off no end. I got into what looked the best queue. The first person had a fair few groceries but the next in line (just ahead of me) had only one item in each hand. Win!! Until her other half turned up with a full trolley and just blithely put it in front of me. It should be against the law to mind someone’s place in the queue. Selfish bastards.
When I said “count back change”, I meant that he/she would say this sort of thing which kept him/her from having to subtract when giving back change:
Total, $3.76, paid with a ten dollar bill
Cashier: That’s $376 out of ten, so 77, 78, 79, 80, 90, four, five, and five is ten.
Not really "calculating’, just counting back the change. Many cash registers back then only gave the total.
When counting back the change, one great thing that happened was that the coins went in the customer’s hand FIRST, and not* awkwardly piled on top of the bills*! I hate it when they try to pile the coins on the bills!!! (Yes, I have been a cashier, and NO, I didn’t pile the coins on the bills.)
I second that, expectopatronum. In fact, I’ve seen plenty of instances where men are either chatting up,the female checkers, or the male ones, and vice versa. Women do the same, but honestly, it goes both ways. And I resent the chatty checkers when they keep me waiting, or the lineup behind me. I feel their frustration.
One of the checkers at my local Safeway is horribly disorganized. She forgets what she has scanned, and if you interrupt her flow (like asking for cigarettes or bus tix, which she then has to fetch from another part of the store) she will add that amount to the bill, get the item, but then promptly forget she has added the item, and then reel back the tape to check. It’s a real drag being in her line, and I’ve done it exactly twice, but no more.
The second and last time, she got me my bus tix, added them to the bill, and gave them to me, but as I was leaving she stopped me and told me to give back the receipt. She needed to check whether she had actually charged me for the bus tickets. I vowed to never go back in her line again. I occasionally see her getting flustered with other customers and I feel their pain but I won’t go through that again.
You seem to have lots of stories of throwing tantrums in public (shoving peoples bags off of bus seats if you wants to sit down, reading their cell phone texts if they’re annoying you, smacking them with your cast, etc). And of course, there’s the big-ass fit you threw that landed you in the psychiatric ward.
I may be getting mellower and more tolerant in my dotage so small shit doesn’t bother me as much as it used to, but why exactly is this such a problem, again? So someone causes you to be slowed down in your terribly important life by three, five, maybe even ten minutes. So?
I mean, I get irritated too, but really, what exceptionally important tasks am I rushing off to after buying groceries? Rushing home to post about the ineptitude of the great unwashed?
I chat with people around me, catch up on my tabloid reading, fool with my device, ponder the ingredients list in Altoids or Snickers bars, and remind myself that no doubt there’ve been many a time when shit happened and I myself inconvenienced some random person.
