Pardon me, but it is not up to you to decide whether or not my 15 seconds is valuable or worthless enough to spend watch your pitiful attempt at extortion (whether 1 cent or a million dollars, you’re making threats to get free money).
Carry a goddamn penny.
Threats!? Extortion? Puhleeze. You are truly an asshole.
At times, I had almost regretted starting this thread (I haven’t been able to express things the way I’d like). But now, getting to see the true colors of histrionic hyperbole-filled fuckers like you makes it worth the effort.
Why don’t you give up a dollar and just tell the cashier to keep the 99 cents? If pennies are so worthless, 99 of them isn’t worth very much either.
This can all be avoided if you man up and quit being a passive-aggressive ass. You don’t have to put on a “let me look on the ground” dog and pony show. Why not just say “I really don’t want to carry around a pocket full of change, do you have the three cents?” and let the cashier make the decision and leave it at that. Or do you not want to say it because you know you’d sound like a self-important dick?
Although I don’t doubt your word, it boggles my mind that most people behind you are on your side. I would personally take great delight in taking a penny and flicking it about 10 feet away and saying “Go fetch, boy!” If you didn’t HAVE the money, I’d gladly hand it over with a smile, as I have often done. Being an ass because you’re too good to carry change around? We’d play fetch for as many pennies as you’d need.
Not really. What I was pointing out that the most tactful way for you to respond to said situation would be to say nothing at all. Period. It doesn’t matter whether you say, “Can you fuggeddabout him and ring me up please?” to the cashier politely, or rudely–just the fact of you mentioning it at all, no matter whether you’re asking her politely, or rudely, you’re still basically asking her to let you jump the line, bypassing Karl’s turn at the register. And thus the truly courteous thing to do would be to say nothing at all.
Which is the point I was trying to make. It has nothing to do with ignoring your posts, or self-righteous preaching, or reading comprehension.
See, what you’re missing is that I’m saying that you shouldn’t even ask her to move on to your purchase. At all. Period. It doesn’t matter whether you say it with a pissed-off voice and a snide look, or whether you do it with the serene smile of an angel on Prozac–you’re still asking her to ignore the customer whose turn it actually is, and wait on you instead of him.
Be careful–you could get hit by a car door and not be able to race your hot rod.
And just how long am I expected to keep quiet, while KG is crawling around on the floor looking for a penny? 15 seconds? 1 minute? 1 hour?
Hmmm. I thought that by kicking off my post with a line from Airplane! might convey the idea that I wasn’t completely serious, but sometimes I forget that just because I get a reference, it doesn’t mean that someone else will, and to be fair, it is sorta obscure.
Seriously? At my store, you only have to wait long enough for the cashier to figure out you’re getting irritable and to holler for a second checker, whereupon you can go over to Cosmetics or the Photo Lab, or perhaps the SIMS gal will step up to Register Two if she’s in the vicinity. We do take customer service seriously, and we will make every effort to expedite your purchase if the customer ahead of you in line is being a sluggish dickweed.
But there are ways of expressing your impatience without verbally asking the cashier to let you jump the line, even politely. Ordinarily a simple rolleyes and weary sigh will do it, to a cashier of normal, or even subnormal perception. You don’t even have to address yourself to the dickweed surveying the floor for pennies; just allow your body english to express “geezum crow, can we get OUTTA here?”, and the cashier will generally take the hint.
Because, see, it’s Karl’s turn. He has the right to take as long as he requires to complete his transaction as long as it’s his turn. That’s how it’s set up: we queue up and we Take Turns.
And no matter whether he wants to scour the floor for a penny, or wants to spend long, laborious minutes ever…so…slowly…writing out a check and entering it in his check register, or wants to stand there and dig through his suitcase-sized pocketbook for three cents possibly–or possibly not–down in the bottom, or wants to work his way through a double handful of gift and debit cards to see which ones still have some money left on them…No matter what he wants to do, when it’s his turn, he has the right to do it, however long it takes, however irritating it is to both the cashier and the next folks in line.
And the only time he forfeits the right to take his own sweet time (god help us) transacting his purchase is when he himself abrogates the transaction in one of two ways: either by not having enough money, in whatever form, so that the transaction cannot be completed. Or by physically walking away from the register, as in, “I have more money out in the car”, or “Wait, I forgot to get toilet paper, lemme run back and grab some”. Either way, his turn is “up”, and it then becomes a judgement call on the part of the cashier, whether she wants to move on to the next customer. If there’s nobody waiting, perhaps she’ll allow the mope to go out to the car and get more money, and leave his transaction hanging there on her register. At the other end of the spectrum, if there’s even one person waiting in line when he races away to grab some toilet paper, she’s extremely like to not wait for him, and to quickly cash him out and go on to you, and when he comes back, he’ll have to start over. A lot depends on what that next person in line’s body english says. If he says, “Oh, I’m fine” and sounds like he means it, we’ll all wait while the mope gets his TP. But if he says anything other than a sincere-sounding, “Oh, I’m fine”, the mope gets booted from line.
Didn’t you say that you threaten to never return to the store unless they front you the penny?
Are you not purposefully delaying their business transactions unless they “lend” you a penny?
That is extortion. If you want to take a de minimus approach, then fine - but understand that your demands that everyone around you serve your desire to not carry a penny make you a bigger asshole.
I personally don’t care how long someone hems and haws over a penny…I am usually not in a big rush.
But I am interpreting mixed messages in your posts…if someone asks to be let ahead, couldn’t you make every effort to expedite that customer, in keeping with the policy of taking customer care very seriously? I mean, using the alternate routes you suggested?
Seems to me it should be better for someone to directly make a request than to do all of that eye-rolling, belly aching, body language, limp posturing…I mean come on… That all seems a bit childish actually.
At this point, my polite “spoken English” directly says the same thing as my “body english,” or another customer’s response of “No, I’m not fine.” However, you insist that you will only respond to “body english” or an answer you’ve solicited. Why is that? How come the next person in line can get things to move along by saying “No, I’m not fine,” and I can’t, with a direct, polite query indicating the same thing, when both you and I see KG’s transaction is being stalled needlessly?
The first bolded portion of your post implies that, not only can KG continue shopping, search around for 3 pennies, write out his check (and balance his checkbox) and/or take out his left ball and scratch it for 20 minutes because you say so, but also implies that, as long as he remains there at the register, he can remove and rearrange everything in his satchel, take and make a few calls on his cell phone, read a chapter of War and Peace, re-tie his bow tie, and do any other thing that he has a mind to do, before you allow the transaction to be completed. If you actually did this in the real world more than a few times, you’d be out of a job PDQ. I suspect you don’t really believe or practice any of this. You just want to be right.
I don’t see how you can’t see that your catering to everything KG might do at the register is more wrong than trying to complete or close out his stalled transaction (stalled by whatever means he chooses) in a timely and fair manner for all and move the line along so the other waiting customers are accomodated too.
Your suggestion about opening other registers also assumes that another register can always be opened, which a lot times, isn’t the case.
For you not to be able to see that this is true by now tells me you’re just writing at this point because you just can’t admit that, in the real world, you’re wrong. The second bolded portion of your post illustrates this to a T.
I think if you actually read **Duck Duck Goose’s ** post instead of looking through it for things you can exaggerate, you’ll find that the things she’s tolerating are things that actually contribute to finishing the transaction, however slowly. Nowhere did she say anything about balancing a checkbook, or scratching select portions of anyone’s anatomy. All she said was that the customer in front of you has the right to complete his transaction in the way he chooses, by check, by debit card, by ten gift cards, or by finding the last three pennies in the bottom of a purse that could house a family of four. And until that happens *she herself * cannot move on to your transaction. She will probably be willing to find someone who can.
So for you to ask her to take you instead is useless. Expressing your impatience is acceptable, within bounds, as long as you don’t put the cashier in an untenable situation. Don’t ask her to do something she is not allowed to do. That’s all she said.
In response to your suggestion about how I might read DDG’s posts, I suggest you at least read what I’ve written up to now.
My initial posts in this threads acknowledged and respected the cashier’s reasonable choices surrounding this issue, as well as the willingness to accept his/her reasonable responses once I asked. Is that putting anyone in an untenable possible, as you suggest here?
Just so you know, hyperbole can sometime be useful, in this case, as a way of getting the poster to think how long is too long to wait for a person to finish paying for their transaction and move on so the next person can have their time. What she wrote suggested it was interminably open-ended.
Thirdwarning, further you’re cherry-picking amongst the sentences she wrote if you don’t see the dichotomy between her saying she would respond to some indeterminable display of “body language” or a response re impatience initiated by her, but not to a respectful, polite response from a customer that communicates more directly the exact same thing.
Okay, here’s a test: you’re in line at the movie theater. And suddenly your date is having the devil of a time deciding what he wants to see. You thought you had it all decided, that you were gonna see Fabulous Movie #1, but suddenly, now that you’re here, he’s, like, “Oh, man, maybe we oughta see Fabulous Movie #2 instead…” And while you’re discussing it for a moment, the guy in line behind you leans forward and says to the cashier, “Excuse me, but could you wait on me instead of them?”
How would you feel? Would you be “Hey, MYOB” pissed off? Or would you step aside–thus losing your turn, and possibly having to go to the end of the line if the guy behind HIM doesn’t feel like letting you back in line in front of HIM?
This situation could be extrapolated to any time you’re in line, anywhere. The gas station, 7-11, a Broadway theater–any time the guy in line behind you thinks that your transaction is taking too long, and leans forward and asks the cashier to wait on him instead of on you, thus bypassing you and possibly forcing you to go to the end of the line and start again. How would you feel?
Part of my job as a cashier involves making sure people Take Turns fairly. And sometimes that means that the guy in line behind the old lady taking forever to write out a check has to WAIT, because it’s “Her Turn”, and if it takes forever and a day for her to write out a check, then it just sucks to be him. Because it’s Her Turn, and she gets to do what she wants when it’s Her Turn.
Well, yeah, occasionally, it is. Those are the very, very few times when it’s just me and the Photo Lab gal, who is busy with customers, and the assistant manager, who is engaged with the cops in the office, and the Cosmetics gal is on break, and there just plain isn’t anybody else in the store to take your business. In that case, yeah, you just gotta suck it up and wait while Mrs. Gonzo looks through her entire purse for three cents.
Or else, of course, you can put your merchandise down on the mini-gondola and leave. I’ve had people do that. No skin off my nose.
But tell Mrs. Gonzo, “I’m sorry, ma’am, you’re taking too long, I’m going to have to bump you in order to wait on this gentleman”? No. Never gonna happen. First Rule of Polite Cashiering: You never tell a customer he’s taking too long. Because that’s RUDE. You stand there and wait patiently while they get their lives in order.
And when the next guy in line doesn’t “get” that it’s rude for ME to tell Mrs. Gonzo that she’s taking too long and to kick her out of the line, and asks me, however politely, to be rude to HER on his behalf–that’s RUDE, too.
Period.
A. BECAUSE IT’S NOT YOUR JOB TO DECIDE THAT KARL’S TRANSACTION IS TAKING TOO LONG.
It’s NOBODY’S job to decide that. A transaction takes as long as it takes. Get used to it.
And…
B. The person in line who can get things to move along by saying, “No, I’m not fine”–that particular person in my illustration is responding solely to MY query, a query which is posed ONLY in the situation of Karl’s seeming to ABANDON the transaction–when he says, “Oh, wait, I forgot toilet paper” and leaves.
The person in line who is merely fulminating because he thinks Karl is taking too long is S.O.L., and gets no response from me.
Silly exaggeration hardly helps your case.
I’ve had women stand there and chitchat with each other, or fill out a greeting card they’ve just bought, but in every case–EVERY CASE–after a few seconds they realize that they’re blocking traffic, usually because the next person in line pointedly moves into their “space” in order to receive their change and bagged merchandise, and they move off. There’s only one time in 18 months of cashiering that I can remember that not happening: an extremely old lady who planted herself at the side of my register and slowly and painfully filled out a Hallmark card with the assistance of her equally ancient friend, and so clearly were these two ladies in a class by themselves that the three or four subsequent customers who had to maneuver around them were quite respectful of that kind of mad genius.
Erm, no, actually, what I preach here is what I live in real life.
Again, it’s rude for me to tell him he’s taking too long. The other waiting customers presumably “get” that waiting in line sometimes takes longer because of irritatingly slow people ahead of them. At the gas station, at 7-11, at McDonalds–sometimes it just takes longer. Everybody else understands this.
Right. And so, unfortunately, this means that sometimes you [horrors!] have to wait. Sucks to be you, I guess.
Oh pooh. Pooh and piffle.
Just to clarify here: My response to body english of “impatience” or a request by the next-in-line would be not to bump Karl, but to call for a second checker and to send you over to Cosmetics. Perhaps my post was poorly composed; if so, I apologize. I would expedite your purchase by attempting to have someone else ring you up at a different register, not by kicking Karl out of line.
Duck Duck Goose, I honestly wouldn’t mind someone making that request. We probably should step aside until we figure out what the heck movie we want to see, or whatever.
But don’t miss understand me…I would wait very patiently for anyone hemming and hawing over which movie to see (providing it wasn’t going to make me late for my own movie…in that case I would probably call a manager and let her know that I have been waiting for over 15 minutes blah, blah.) Also,* I* would never hold anyone up like that.
The point I was making is that if someone* is * going to get impatient, it would make far more sense to make a direct request to the cashier (which of course the cashier could deny) than to be sighing and moaning and acting like an inarticulate insolent child.
I am not disagreeing with you though, that a cashier shouldn’t skip a customer in line if she doesn’t see fit to. I am just saying that if you *are * going to make use of an alternate route (calling another cashier to open a lane or whatever), then better it be done at the prompt of a direct request.
I’m not disagreeing with you, either; I think what’s happening is we’ve ended up collectively talking about two completely different situations.
Situation A: 5-4 feels that Karl’s transaction is taking too long.
Situation B: Karl is unable to complete his transaction, either because he doesn’t have any money, or because he physically leaves his place in line, for whatever reason.
In Situation A, 5-4 is just gonna have to suck it up and wait; I’m not going to bump Karl from his turn just because he’s taking a long time.
In Situation B, I agree that it’s perfectly kosher for 5-4 to say to me, as Karl hustles to the back of the store for his TP, “Oy, ring me up now?” Or, alternatively, he doesn’t even have to say anything–he can just roll his eyes, and I’ll take the hint and void Karl out and dump his other “stuf” on the floor behind me, and when he gets back with his TP, he can start over.
But what is not kosher is for 5-4 to say to me, in Situation A, “Oy, ring me up now?”
Because it’s still Karl’s turn.
Re the movie theater situation: kudos to you for being a civilized human being. 
The majority of people I’ve encountered at the megaplex would give you a hard, pissy stare if you attempted to “play through”, and resume their intense discussion of the merits of the Briefly Famous Eighties TV Star Reinventing Himself Movie vs. Hannah Montana IV: A New Hope.