I Guess That Makes Two of You Then

For the duration of my shift today, I was operating the self-service checkouts. I’ve been working these “Self Checks” so long, it’s gotten downright boring for me, as every minute presents me with the same cycle of customers.

The customers who use the “Self Checks” fall into three general categories, each of these having its own subset of descriptions. To get the gist of what you can expect when working the Self Checks, here’s a quick overview of the people you’ll see:

1) The Anti-Socials. If you are working a normal register, these are the people who quickly and quietly pass you on their way to the Self Checks, almost making it seem as if you weren’t anxiously standing at your empty register ready to help them. But when you’re working at the Self Checks, and they need your assistance, the only way you’ll know this is by their combination death stare/scowl/eyebrows shaped like the letter V.

2) The Know-It-Alls. They’ve been watching you ring up their orders for years, so they think, “Sh*t, I can do his job.” They stroll up to a vacant Self Check register, load the contents of their cart onto the belt, and scan their first item. Immediately, they try scanning their second item, but the Self Check instructs them to “Place [their first] item in bagging area”–if the store wouldn’t have to worry about the scumbag customers who steal their merchandise (intentionally or not), the store wouldn’t require their self-service registers to weigh each item after it is scanned, or hire a cashier who has to babysit the people who don’t know what they’re doing, at that.

3) The Impatients. It doesn’t help that “FastLane” is printed underneath the register light, some people just think these are the fastest lanes in the store because they are the ones controlling their speed. Only when they realize that they have no idea what the hell they are doing are they wasting their own time, let alone mine when I have to fix their errors on every other item. This job becomes particularly difficult when multiple Impatients are using the Self Checks at the same time (make up your own horror stories here).

None of these descriptions are by any means complete or accurate; this is solely based on personal observation and opinion. Then again, this pretty much summarizes everything I did today, and I worked a seven-hour shift.

Customer of the Day: A man and his son have about a dozen things in their cart and they start ringing up their order–the little boy is scanning the items, the dad is bagging. Every time the machine notices an error and speaks a command in its generic female voice, the father replies back to the machine as if it’ll hear him and back down, ashamed for even opening its speaker. Taking a look at this guy, he looks like the kind of man who always talks down to women, whether she’s his miserable wife or the computer voice of a grocery store register. Near the end of the transaction, there’s just so much frustration of noise–the dad’s frustration from the register, my own frustration from the dad–that the following statement was uttered by the guy:

“This thing is talking so much because it doesn’t know what it’s doing.”

I guess that makes two of you then.