I was at Walmart to pick up a few things, and got in line at the express checkout (this has a 20 item limit). In front of me is a woman. Across the aisle, in the other express line is her husband, with another cart. Both carts had an appropriate number of items for the express lane, and each has one customer ahead of them, and one behind (including me).
A minute after I get in line, the wife realizes she has to go to customer service, takes her purse and leaves. Husband pushes her cart up and unloads it onto the belt, leaving his cart in place. While her cashier is scanning, his cashier finishes with the customer ahead of him and looks around, puzzled. More customers appear in each line. Husband realizes he’s holding things up, and still standing at her register, tells the person behind his cart to go ahead. I don’t think the other customer heard him. He eventually steps across the aisle to wave the guy ahead. He pays for her groceries and moves her cart up so I can unload. Then he goes over to unload and pay for his items.
My instinct is to move wife’s cart aside and let her line go forward while she was absent, then she will rejoin the line once she has returned. Husbands actions delayed each line, his more than hers. Was he rude? Are there other solutions? Thanks! 0102-18
I believe the polite thing to have done was that the wife exit from the line altogether and rejoin it when she is capable of overseeing the transaction. Her husband should have pulled the cart from the line as a courtesy to shoppers behind his wife’s cart.
Oh I recognize this game. My husband has these tendencies (has never suggested taking up two checkout lines though), I see it as a desire to “game the system” in a way, by being in the correct place at the right time. It means that he is frantically on the lookout for the shortest and fastest checkout line at the grocery store, and weaving around traffic to be in the best possible lane on the highway. Inevitably, someone ahead of us needs to get a price check or the cashier is abnormally slow, and a car needs to turn left on a busy street and we are stuck behind them. Then he gets irrationally annoyed like someone is intentionally throwing a kink in his plans, and my immediate thought is that if he wasn’t so focused on “winning” then he wouldn’t feel so robbed when normal life keeps happening around him.
Oh and I just thought of another one. My best friend gets antsy really easily. We were in a grocery store getting a few things, and when we got in line they were all about 5 people deep. I see her squirming on her feet, and she suggests that we basically just drop our baskets where we stood and go to another store. All I could say was “are you #$&ing serious right now?” We’re gonna leave our stuff on the floor for an employee to put back, get in the car, drive to another store, redo our shopping and possibly get in another lineup that is just as long (especially considering that the later into the evening it gets, grocery stores start sending more cashiers home), waste probably a solid 30-45 minutes doing all of this all so we didn’t have to stand around for 10-15 minutes. I was seriously stunned.
My husband’s version of this is to insist, every time we hit traffic, that I dig out a bajillion apps and the GPS and maybe use psychic powers to find us a new route. The new route must be magically free of traffic, even though the area in which we live is notorious for tie-ups. Oh, and did I mention that I hate technology and fiddling with a bunch of different things makes me absolutely crazy?
So, nowadays, I do most of the driving. It’s just not worth the aggravation.
For the most part, I’d rather just cool my heels and think of something else than try to angle for some advantage that might gain me 30 seconds, at the cost of several minutes of stress.
Meeeee tooooo!
I don’t understand this at all. I don’t understand what he’s in such a hurry to do.
Makes me crazy.
Like, we usually leave for places with plenty of extra padding built into the schedule, because traffic is so common. So why on Earth am I scrambling about on my phone, when even with traffic we’ll be early anyway? Not every moment in life has to be perfectly optimized and efficient.
The mid 90’s. One bad chunk of snaky interstate through town. Next town is an hour south from the north end IF the traffic is with you. Mr. Beemer… cell in his ear and angling for every inch he can get, he would even drive on the shoulder. I think everyone knew about him in the mid afternoon, he would weave through traffic angling for the INCH to get south. Highway patrol trying to nab him… One afternoon I was beside a semi on the left (2 lanes) and we were both doing limit and it’s thickly solid. Traffic is moving but we are pretty tight. Mr. Beemer shows up and is going between which one of us…then I make turn signal, I have to pull off on that exit, so he swings in behind semi. Semi driver looks down at me and makes the gesture for CB. I shake head but point backwards with thumb with hand in front of chest. He calls a semi behind me and asked the guy to move up. As I left the semi’s were nose and nose and the guy was standing on the seat with one leg and screaming into his phone. He WAS STUCK. He got a few more exits down to where he often liked to drive the shoulder, pulled out to do so and for ONCE the highway patrol was on the overpass and swooped down and got him. I didn’t see him again in mid-afternoon driving….
I worked at a grocery store for years and years. People did this ALL THE TIME. Seriously, at least once a day someone would wander off from their cart. Sometimes they’d tell me they were going to grab something and sometimes they’d vanish. In either case, if the person wasn’t there I would take the next customer. People would be furious but we were a crazy busy store and even a minute or two would slow things down. I agree with Admin, if you have to go grab something, you step out of line. It’s entitled and selfish
I should add: I worked at Trader Joe’s where (for the uninitiated) there’s no belt so you don’t unload your cart, the cashier scans the items as they pull them from the cart. This made it much easier to skip people. Regular grocery stores the cashier is kind of screwed because the shopping load is already piled onto the belt,
I agree with Admin. If you need to make a transaction at a different part of the store (customer service), you either wait until you have completed your transaction at the check out line, then go to customer service or get out of line altogether and rejoin when you completed your customer service business.
Check out lines can be, and often are, frustrating. You try to pick the shortest, fastest line and somehow it ends up taking forever. Holding up the line while you run back to get something you forgot or leaving the line completely to go do business elsewhere but blocking customers from moving forward (like this customer did), just makes it worse. Just a bit of courtesy to others makes things easier to bear.
Wife was inconsiderate first for going to customer service, which is never quick, in my experience, while leaving her cart in line, then her husband, for attempting to work two lanes at once instead of pulling his wife’s cart out of line.
About 12 years ago I worked at Wal-Mart at the customer service desk. If you had under 20 items we would just ring you out along with whatever transaction you had (return, money order, etc.) so the wife in this scenario could most likely have just taken her cart to customer service instead of leaving it.
Yes! And what a good solution.
One cart should have been shunted to the side to rejoin the line when the other person returned. Mister could then follow through with the transaction he chose to complete. Period. What he did wasn’t appropriate. One being, one line, one at a time.
Why this sudden ”realizes she has to go to customer service”? Is ”customer service” some euphemism for the Ladies’ room, powder her nose, wash her hands, the facilities, cr@p, take a sh1t or something?
Just curious why it couldn’t wait. And English is not my native language, so I’m not familiar with all slang and euphemisms.
You did fine.
But no, I’ve not known “customer service” to be code for the restroom.
At Walmart, Customer Service is where you go to return or exchange merchandise, cash your paycheck or a check, get a money order or send money to a friend or relative at another Walmart, etc.
But… why had she have to go to the customer service while she was waiting in line? Why not after she was finished? Or before starting shopping?
(I did not really think that ”customer service” was the t01let, but I don’t understand her urgency)
It’s selfishness. If she did it before shopping or after checkout, it would take more time out of her day. By doing it while just standing in line, it might have delayed other people, but didn’t delay her (massive amounts of a sarcasm here).
I don’t understand why the wife didn’t finish her transaction and THEN go to customer service? There isn’t anything that I can think of that can’t would necessitate her returning to the line after visiting customer service, generally speaking. They are usually equipped to ring items up and exchange or refund as needed. But if you’re too antsy to stand in line, why not shop online? There isn’t too much of a markup unless you use a branded service (Uber, Lyft, and in-store models). In fact, you can usually save on bulk purchases. But two lines because you’re in a hurry and you have to visit customer service and also keep two baskets moving solo while your wife is missing in action would try the patience of most people.
oops, “can’t” survived editing, and it shouldn’t have, sorry!
It sounds like they were trying to game the system in the first place by splitting up so they could go in the express lanes. I’m betting the rudeness began before the wife wandered out. If it was just about paying on separate cards, they’d have been in the same line to begin with.
I’m not even mad at them gaming the system or think that deserves being thrown into ehell. Grocery stores are large and crowded, splitting up your shop between the two of them is kind of smart. He takes produce and meat while she handles dairy and canned goods. Each take twenty items through the express check out and your shop is done in half the time. To me that is efficiency! The rudeness is thinking you can get out of line and hold your spot. To someone who has thought out how to game the system should know that getting served at customer service takes just as long, if not longer than the regular line. Someone else said maybe it was an excuse to handle a personal emergency, but the cart still should have been removed from line once it’s owner abandoned it.
Why couldn’t she take her cart and get her items checked out at customer service? They have cash registers there too.
There will always be people like this. They don’t think about others, only what is best for themselves. I feel the same way about people who arrive in the “ten items or less” lines with shopping carts filled with groceries because they don’t want to wait in line. I believe these people are created with the specific intention of teaching the rest of us patience. Try to keep things in perspective. I was in a grocery store check out line when the cash register’s tape ran out. The man in front of me began to complain about having to wait to have the tape changed. “It always happens to me!” He asked if I was upset. I told him what I was thinking, ” My friend learned that his nineteen year old son has cancer today. That is the worse thing that happened to him today. The worse thing that has happened to me is that this cash register tape has run out. I am going to stand here quietly and wait for it to be changed, thankful that this is all I need to deal with today.”
Love this. When my customers got particularly snarky about something are used to say something along these lines. Although to be honest it usually only made them angrier, but I was just the cashier.
My parents used to do this weird thing, where they would join 2 different checkout lines, wait till one of them was close to the till and then join forces. When I was a kid, they tried to use me as a placeholder in a third line, too.
I used to fight with them about how embarrassing and uncivilized their trick was.
Good for you for breaking the cycle.