We weren’t particularly busy tonight—which was part of the logic behind shutting down the Self Checks earlier than normal—so it was a slight shock when one register managed to attract a line of five waiting customers in a short period of time. As I soon found out, there was a reason the cashier requested my assistance, and I was put into a stupor of stupid upon realizing it.

The customer at the front of the line had a total of 68 items…in the “20 Items or Less” lane! [The secretly humorous part of this was that 65 of these items were TV dinners that were on sale.] I don’t want to scorn my fellow cashier for accepting the order in the first place, because customers should just know better. But that’s just what my common sense tells me—I should realize not many are born with such a gift.

Here’s what else my common sense tells me:

Working the "20 Items or Less" Lane

I recently got a haircut. As natural as the conversation about the weather when two strangers–who don’t know a better ice-breaker–meet, everyone I see lately can’t help but notice I’m wearing less hair than usual. In the upcoming days, I look forward to laughing at how accurate this following data is, when all my friends and acquaintances stupidly point out my shortened hair.

Apparently it “looks nice”, too.

Getting Your Ears, and IQ, Lowered

A lot of this data has many details behind them, so I should probably elaborate on some of these further; this one should speak for itself:

People Who Pay With Only $1 Bills

I thought this trend would cease only a few weeks after the pizza place moved out, but I was horribly wrong; in fact, at four separate times during my short shift today–this happens every weekend if you’re on the right registers–it was proven to me that not many people have a very good power of observation.

Each quote is just one of twenty-seven action phrases that come with every “Super Stupid Customer Doll”!

“What used to be there?”

“Where did the pizza place go?”

“How long has the pizza place been gone?”

Come to think of it, that pizza place has been gone for nearly a year now.

Customer of the Day: While I was covering a break for the associate who greets the customers, a middle-aged woman comes to me and tells me she wants to return the dish rack she was holding.

The “Door Greeters” usually put a special sticker on the products that need to be returned–this makes the lives of the Service Desk associates easier, bless their hearts. Unfortunately, I don’t know how to operate the price gun to make the sticker.

I tell the customer, “You can just take that straight to the desk today.” She grumbled to herself and trudged to the electric scooters. I’m standing there a bit confused, as the Service Desk is just a short walk from the entrance. Maybe that’s just me.

On her ride up to the service desk, I happened to read her shirt:

Tough enough to wear pink?

Sure, I was using her breast cancer shirt out-of-context, but that doesn’t mean the irony wasn’t there.

As I’m waiting for my shots to be read (I wait 20 minutes after the shot to see if any abnormal side effects emerge), I’m standing in the stairwell, staring out the window, thinking. A mom and her 2 kids barge through the door. The mom starts down the stairs and yells at the kids, “You can take the stairs; it’s not going to kill you.” As kids usually are, they’re complaining they can’t use the elevator. The oldest of the kids, probably 10-11, says, “What if I have a heart attack?” At this point, the response the mom came back with floored me.

“Don’t be dumb. Those won’t kill you.”

…

Really? REALLY? Wow…who knew they let anyone parent…

Here is a bit of data I’ve collected:

Making Sense of Workplace Decisions

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.

Today, a guy no less than 400 pounds was using one of the scooters to shop when it shut down near the main aisle by the registers. A loud, recurring beeping noise was coming from the machine, and after checking on it during a downtime, I concluded that the battery was dead. Without getting scientific or technical, I imagine it would require more energy to transport a heavier load over the same distance than a person who, say, broke their ankle and was, say, “normal” size.

It’s very likely the battery was still weak from its previous passenger, a slightly lighter woman, but I still find it funny to think that the beeping might have been a cry for help from the poor, overworked machine. I don’t claim to speak “scooter-ese”, but I swear that thing was complaining, “I don’t get paid enough to tote these chunkers around this store every day.”

These special wheelchairs are being provided to help the elderly and the crippled complete their necessary errands with greater ease, not as a mean for the lazy and the obese to avoid the necessary exercise they need to stay healthy. There must be some way to change this…

Just put a sensor in the seat the blasts this song whenever the weight registered is over 300 pounds, and the occupant’s fat face will be so red with embarrassment that they’ll immediately ride to the sporting goods section and buy some exercise equipment! Problem solved!