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| Andrea Del Pesco, Supermarket |
You're in the checkout lane with a shopping cart filled to capacity with groceries. It's a Sunday afternoon; the store is mobbed, I haven't budged from the cash register in nearly two hours, and there are six people in line behind you. I have to tally up your groceries; you have to pay for them. And one way or another, all of your stuff has to be bagged neatly and swiftly and placed back in your cart.
You can't help me ring up your stuff; I can't help you pay for it. But you can help me bag up your $300 load of groceries. Nobody's forcing you, of course: if you'd prefer not be bothered, I'll just have to do it by myself.
In this situation it absolutely does not matter to me what you might feel or believe about me or anything else. Maybe you're the kind of person who listens to Rush Limbaugh every day. Maybe you believe climate change is a hoax and think that gun-toting public school teachers are a great idea. Maybe you're looking at me and just seeing some sluggard who never got a "real" job. Maybe, for some reason, you plain don't like the way I look, dress, or talk. I don't care. Provided you aren't being nasty to me, as long as you're helping me bag your groceries—putting in a small effort so that things will move along more smoothly for me, for the people behind you in line, and ultimately for yourself—you're okay in my book. We might not ever be friends, but I'm not going to say you're a bad person. You're the type who's willing to do a small, friendly thing to help out a stranger, and that's a fine quality for a human being to possess.
Contrariwise, I don't care who you are—you could be a lecturer and activist who travels the country facilitating workshops on justice and equality; you could be a brilliant artist or writer; you could be the head of an NGO dedicated to mitigating climate change, improving literacy rates, and/or solving the urban "food desert" problem—if, while I'm ringing you up and bagging your tremendous load of groceries all by myself as the six people behind you in line are seething with impatience, you're gabbing away on your phone, texting, or just staring at me from across the counter with your arms at your sides, I don't care who you are or what you do in your life beyond the sliding glass doors. You can't be bothered. You're an asshole.
MORAL. Our definitions of "good people" probably tend towards the self-involved, if not self-serving.
Not sure what kind of grocery store you work in, but at the places where I usually shop, customers aren't allowed to assist checkout workers with any part of the bagging process. It wouldn't be terribly practical to try to help anyway; the checkers ring up each item, place it into the bag directly in front of them, then put the bag into the cart directly next to them. There's no way a customer could position themselves to help bag the items without it being quite awkward. It would actually probably come across as insulting if you tried to do that.
ReplyDeleteI do try to make the checkers' job a tiny bit easier in how I place food on the conveyer belt by grouping similar items together so they can bag everything as it comes and don't have to set stuff aside. At the very least, I try to make sure loose fruits/vegetables and frozen items are grouped together.
Proper etiquette between customers and employees can sometimes be a tad tricky. :/
I'm reluctant to name where I work (it's a national chain—but what isn't these days?), but the setup is something like this: there's no conveyor belt. The shopping cart is rolled onto the cashier's side; the cashier takes the stuff out of the cart, scans it, and pushes it further down on the counter, where it just sits there until it's bagged. The customer has a little platform at the end of the counter where they're invited to bag their own stuff. Without going into too much detail about the construction of the counter, it's tricky for the cashier to start throwing stuff in paper bags (we only use paper bags) without taking a break from ringing.
DeleteIt's not a bad setup, really—but it tends to move a bit slowly if the customer isn't taking an active role in the transaction.
We have it good in North America. I remember going to Lidl stores in Europe, where the cashier does not help you bag your stuff at all. The dude/dudette just stands there with a look of scorn in their face, silently saying: "c'mon, get 'dat shit off my table, loser".
ReplyDeleteNow, the real question is: do cashiers judge people by what they buy? I'm a bit self-conscious about that, myself. Y'know, if I buy nothing but two bags of chips, I'm tempted to throw an onion in there, to confuse the cashier into thinking that I'm a health-conscious foodie. Sucker!
Where in Europe? I think the customer service culture varies from nation to nation. I've found that in Poland, cashiers will frequently ask you if you have exact change. If the answer is no, then you probably aren't doing business (unless you want a Coke or a pack of cigarettes badly enough to be shortchanged.)
DeleteHere in Denmark the customer has to do all the bagging themselves.
ReplyDeleteThat's because Denmark is civilized! ...or maybe because it shares its customer service ethos with Poland (national motto: "pierdol się, mamy zamknięte").
DeleteIm pretty sure they are not staring at your gross understatements you fickle, cheating, philanderer. They will soon learn as i did.
ReplyDelete