Life in the CheckOut Lane

Life in the check out lane and "life in the fast lane" definitely are not synonymous. Seems like I always manage to get stuck in the wrong lane when I'm ready to checkout my merchandise. It's like radar, I can zone in one the lane where I'll end up spending more time than is necessary or than I had planned to. You look at the lane with the least number of people with the least number of items and it never fails, you end up stuck there because of some issue with the customer in front of you. Not that it's necessarily the customer's fault, but, doo doo happens.

Just the other day I was in one of the nation's major department stores, as my Dad calls it "Wally World." Leave to your imagination. My Dad is 76 and a cut-up. Anyways, in "Wally World" they have about 20 checkout lanes including the self serve checkout lanes. Needless to say, whenever I go in there, the self serve lanes are never open and usually there are only 2 cashiers working on the other lanes. Why they need so many checkout lanes when they don't even use most of them I'll never know. Seems like a waste of retail space.

Being the choice of open lanes to be slim to none, I stood in one lane behind a customer that apparently was in the military. I only had 5 items and didn't use a cart and I figured this shouldn't take long. Wrong, Wrong, Wrong! "Wally World" gives a discount to military personnel when they make their purchase, which is a good thing. Turns out that the discount was not being accepted by the register. So I waited, and I waited. The cashier couldn't figure what had gone wrong. A manager came by and he didn't know what the problem was either. Another cashier stopped by, she didn't know. Finally their were about 5 employees aimlessly standing around, none of them knew anything. Meanwhile, more customers are backing up behind me. The cashier in my lane was completely oblivious to the fact that there were other customers waiting behind me to have their purchases wrung up. Just so happens that this particular checkout lane was across from the customer service counter where I saw 2 other employees standing in front of the counter and I walked up to them and asked them if they would check out my items. They did and I was able to leave. You would have thought that they would have seen that there was a problem and "offered" to assist other customers. In total I was stuck there for about 10 minutes. Never once was another lane opened or did any other "Wally World" employee offer to assist the other customers.

From my experience, there are numerous other reasons for being delayed at the check out.

There's the food stamp person or food voucher person. They hold up the process because the only thing you can purchase with vouchers is food. No soda or paper products are permitted. Used to be that all of these items had to be separated, but now days the register does it and computes what is allowed to be paid by the voucher and what is paid by cash so the wait isn't as bad as it used to be.

Then there's the neighborhood gopher. This person buys for the whole neighborhood. I was behind a lady one time that she had 4 separate purchases to make. She purchased merchandise for all her friends and had all the items wrung up separately and paid for them separately. More waiting .

Sometimes what happens is the customer has an item that has no price on it or the bar code doesn't scan properly. Generally if there no price on the item, the cashier calls someone from a particular department to verify what the price is. More waiting. In the case where the bar code doesn't scan properly the cashier can key in the numbers on the bar coding to get the register to recognize the price.

Then there's the broke person , who doesn't have enough money buy their merchandise. Instead of subtotaling the purchase as the merchandise is being scanned this person waits until all the items have been scanned before finding out that they don't have enough money to pay for them. What happens is the cashier has to void off what the customer decides that they don't really need. If people would pay attention these days to the running total of what the purchase price is, they wouldn't need to have anything voided off.

Then there's the check-writer, who waits until the cashier gives them the total before writing the check. These people can't think ahead. Please, could you start writing the check before the end of the transaction? At the very least you could fill in the name of the store and your signature on the check.

Of course, there's the big spender. This is the person who has maxed out their credit card and doesn't have the cash to buy their purchases. They are so far in debt and their credit card is denied They shouldn't even be out shopping causing an inconvenience to everyone else.

Sometimes the equipment malfunctions. One other time I was in "Wally World" and I had some bananas. Wouldn't you know the scale at the check out lane wouldn't work. After several trys by the cashier, I ended up leaving the bananas behind and left.

I think that has about covered all the issues that can happen at the check-out.

I've learned that I just don't have the patience to do much shopping. There's no waiting if you shop on-line.