… to pay for a pound of butter, with exact change. And you had to whine about it to the girl behind the register for 5 minutes.
You said it was annoying and rude. Only to end up paying for your shitload of groceries in three separate batches, using three different bankcards, that all took a gazillion tries to get to work. And then at the last batch you remembered you forgot something and ran back into the store, leaving the whole line waiting while you hunted the store for a packet of biscuits…
Now who´s the annoying bitch, you stupid whiney claptard?
Fork you! Fork you with a greasy spork! Fork you for making my icecream melt and my blood boil!
Geez… that feels better. Next!
Behold the wonder of the Internet, where a trivial incident in a supermarket checkout line in the Netherlands instantly becomes a subject of worldwide discussion.
And we really haven’t quite exploited the technology to its fullest yet, unless someone happened to capture the incident on their camera phone and posted it to Youtube, that is.
Speaking as a checkout person, I have to wonder why the checkout person didn’t cut the butter-purchasing line-jumper off at the knees by saying sweetly, “I’m sorry, but this person was ahead of you,” and then simply ignoring her butter and her exact change.
Which is what I do to line-jumpers at Walgreens. I know, it’s tempting to think, “Eh, I’ll get the easy one out of the way first”, but your responsibility to the other people in line calls for you to dig in your heels and demand that courtesy be observed in line. Which means that, yeah, the woman just running in for a pack of smokes can wave at you in frustration over the top of the head of the lady working her way through a stack of WIC checks all she likes–“I just want cigarettes!”–but she’s still gotta wait her turn.
I’d say the 5-minute whine was well-merited, actually (well, okay, maybe not the entire 5 minutes, but still…), because maybe the checkout girl will think twice before she lets someone jump the line again. It’s called “reinforcement”.
And P.S. when someone “forgets” something, and rushes off back into the store, abandoning their merchandise, if there’s anybody in line, what I do is “cash it out”, i.e. total it up, tell the register that she paid cash for it, which closes the transaction and gets it off my register, then take the receipt, write “Total Void” on it, which means management has to void it out, move the merchandise out of the way, and wait on the next customer. Then when Miss Forgetful comes back with her biscuits, she has to get back in line and we take the stuff out of her bags and ring it up all over again.
Actually, although it comes from the Netherlands I think that it lacks that international feel that would unite Dopers from all over the world in sympathy of the universal human condition, and offer a big sweaty {{{Greebo Ogg}}}…
For example:
*-a pound of butter
-girl behind the register
-shitload of groceries
-three different bankcards
-a gazillion tries
-Fork you with a greasy spork
-Fork you for making my icecream melt *
This could very well be a rant from the US, and therefore rather mundane.
How about this instead:
So what if the senorita wanted to cut in front of you in queue to pay for her Camembert with exact escudos? You then proceeded to whinge about it for almost une heure, then tried to pay for your purchase with a Eurail Pass that had expired, and then ran back into la groceria because you had forgotten a bottle of aquavit.
Mangez la merde, you scheisskopf! I want to put my faca in your голова.
Well, you can relax, then. I myself once launched a Pit thread on my annoyance at being followed too closely by someone in a white Toyota, so I’m all about the trivial. I’m just interested to see that some things, like people whining in checkout lines, seem to be universal irritants. Just like the song says, it is a small world, after all.
To sum up, I will defend to the death the OP’s right to bitch about his or her fellow shoppers, even if happen to make fun of it a little.
Or your supervisor even allows it in the first place. When I was working at KrapMart, they followed our transactions very carefully, and if I had done something like that, I’d have been chewed out when I asked for a “void” later on. In fact, IIRC, I don’t even think they could do a total “void” like that-if a customer decided they didn’t want something, we’d have to take everything off, one item at a time. Pain in the ass.
Yeah, lots of times management will not back up the cashiers.
I was witness to an incident where a person of the male persuastion (definitely NOT a gentleman) brought about 47 items to the 10-or-fewer line. When the cashier pointed this out, he growled, “You just do your job, girlie.” Nasty, nasty man. The manager’s little booth was within eyesight AND earshot of the whole thing. Brave Mr. Manager suddenly became very interested in something on the opposite side of his desk.
The appropriate response to “do your job” was to ring up exactly 10 items, and to refuse to ring up any more. That’s her job, when she’s working that line.
Course then the manager might have fired her or something stupid like that.
I am blessed at Walgreens with management that not only would back me up for doing this, but have also done it themselves, quickly whipping out their cash register key and voiding the entire transaction and moving the merchandise off the counter, all in one smooth move.
It’s how it works: “Customer Service” comes first at Walgreens, which means you don’t keep folks waiting while someone else finishes shopping.
And I’ve never had a customer complain about it. I don’t even offer an explanation-- when she gets back with her biscuits, I retrieve her bags and quietly begin taking items out and ringing them up again. Nobody’s ever said a word to me. And if she did, I’d simply say to her apologetically but firmly, “I’m sorry, but you left, and it wasn’t fair to ask all these other people to wait for you.”
Now, I don’t do this every time; there have been a few occasions when someone young and energetic said, “Whoops, I forgot to get my pop!” and does a 180 and races to the cooler, in which case we do all stand there for a few seconds while she gets her pop. But if it’s someone who says vaguely, “Oh…I forgot to get air freshener…” then I know she’s going to be a while, and I cash her out.
You need to come work at Walgreens, honey. They do keep track of how many total voids and line voids (where they change their mind on an item and you have to take it off), expressed as a percentage and compared to store and district averages, and if there’s a pattern or an egregiously large number of them, then Upper Level Management will Take Steps, but ordinarily they don’t have a problem with it.
If Miss Forgetful was buying only one item, of course, I’d just void out the single item and wouldn’t need a total void by management. But somehow she never has only one thing, it’s always the people shopping their way through the entire Sunday circular that remember that one last thing…
This happened to me at Wally World the other night. I saw a lighted register, with no customer, and wanted to ring up my one item purchase.
“Sorry, I’m waiting for a customer who forgot something.”
So I went to the register behind me (you know how they stagger them) and sorta jumped the line. It was accidental, because the guy was just walking up, but I felt bad even though he told me it was ok. While I was getting rung up, the other cashier had to turn away yet another customer.
I wish more cashiers would void out “disappearing” customers.
What is up with women paying in exact change? You rarely see men digging arount in theor pocket to find the 71 cents needed so they don’r get change back.
My boyfriend and I are the exact opposite - he always pays with exact change, if he can, and I never bother. Of course, I use my credit card 98% of the time, so it’s not something I think about very often.
OoooooooooooooOOH! I wish I’d been a witness to that. The man would have wished he’d never have stopped in at the store. I’d go up one side and down the other with a razor edged acid tongue, and I’d march RIGHT Over to the manager and demand that he do his job.
I am completely unable to control my temper when people abuse service employees. and if one of my “fellow” customers is unlucky enough to exhibit this behaviour in front of me, he/she will lose all the time they might have saved by acting so nastily and several minutes more.
I was told I could not refuse or tell people they weren’t allowed in the express lane with more than the advertised items (also at KrapMart), even if other customers complained.
And yes, I probably would have been fired.
Sorry, DDG, but right now, I’m avoiding the big chains. I still have nightmares about KrapMart.
