I’d Pay Him to Get the Checkout Lines to Move Faster
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
Would not help. The biggest delay at checkouts is an elderly person at a self-checkout who doesn’t have a clue about how to use the self checkout. You can’t really complain much about that other than to try and help.
On the other hand, what infuriates me is the person, typically a woman, who keeps her checkbook in her purse in a long regular checkout line until she gets the final tally and only then takes the checkbook out and starts to write the check. What part of “they expect you to pay” is hard to understand? And then having finally written the check and completing the checkout then insists upon putting everything right back in the same place in her purse, channeling her OCD before she moves out of the checkout line. What would it cost her to move two steps forward out of the checkout line while she buttons everything up and allow everybody to start moving again? I know. I know. Have a little patience but to put it in the context I used to often confess that I prayed for patience. So to avoid the problem, I just use Amazon and order it delivered to avoid the near occasion of sin.
Lead,
You beat me to it…
“On the other hand, what infuriates me is the person, typically a woman, who keeps her checkbook in her purse in a long regular checkout line until she gets the…..”
But you’re too kind, there’s almost always a purse involved. Don’t find it infuriating. Find it humorous and vive la différence
….what about the person who looks for the UPC code, finds it, puts the item down, picks it back up, looks at it again then runs it through the eye.
…it’s as if they are worried that the UPC jumped off the package….🙄
My answer to the drill sergeant; I LOVE the Virgin Mary, sir yes sir!
I’m seldom if ever inconvenienced in check-out lines. Some people in self-checkouts move more rapidly than others. Whether you’re in a conventional queue or at a self-checkout, the biggest source of delays is the store’s malfunctioning equipment (which requires the clerk to fetch a supervisor to input various codes). Occasionally, you have a customer with a malfunctioning card. The one really discretionary delay comes from the dame with umpteen coupons to redeem. The worst example I’ve seen of that in recent years wasn’t at a grocery store, but at the general merchandise check-out at CVS pharmacy.
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A lot of mundane nuisances which were common fifty years ago are much less so today if they haven’t disappeared entirely. You’re ill-advised to attempt repairing your own car, but the car is much more reliable than it once would have been. You cannot find a pay phone to save your life, but mobile phones are pervasive. Taxicabs are disappearing (which is an inconvenience to those of us without smart phones), but ride-sharing services are actually much to be preferred. I haven’t heard a busy signal over the telephone in thirty years or more. In the grocery store my mother made use of ca. 1968, the customers were (modally) housewives with three children on average. Large carts were full and clerks entered the prices keystroke by keystroke on analog machines produced by NCR. You paid in cash. There were, btw, ashtrays deployed all over the store – thigh high metal cylinders with an aluminum dish filled with sand topping it.
I agree completely with Art Deco. And usually the only time I am inconvenienced is at CVS, as Art noted.
The service at CVS is so slow it’s their trademark,
The last time I was at CVS I was there at an off hour. There was an employee doing nothing behind the main register so I went there to check out. We stared at each other awkwardly for a bit before I said “Uh, I’d like to check out” and he replied “the self checkout is over there.”
So I go over to the self checkout and try to scan. It doesn’t work with some sort of non-descript error message. I say it isn’t working, and the employee tells me to try again. I do and it still doesn’t work. Finally he comes over and looks at the thing for a few minutes, before finally realizing that an earlier customer stuck a clothes hanger in the edge of the checkout which is interfering with the scan. He takes it out, resets the system, and then I can finally checkout.
If he had just rung me up it would have taken 30 seconds but in the end the whole thing took at least 5 minutes.
To CVS complainers: Try Walgreens.