Saturday, April 11, 2009

Common Courtesy

All right - Item number 46 of Things That Should Go Without Saying:

If the grocery store is packed and there are umpteen million people waiting to check out, and you have more than the "15 or fewer items" or however many that store requires for its express checkout, then for goodness' sake, DON'T try to do the self-checkout - this goes doubly if you have items that you have to enter (e.g produce without a bar code).

2 comments:

Bruce Williams said...

Why? Are the self-checkout lanes specifically for express customers? Is that just common expectation, or are there signs indicating that? This isn't intuitively obvious to me.

Steve said...

It's a common courtesy - self checkout can be faster, if you only have a few items (there are only places for about 4 bags in the self checkout usually), but can take upwards of 15 minutes if you have a full cart (as I experienced waiting for an open lane last week). Delaying that many people because you couldn't get in line with all the other full cart people is selfish and rude. Let the people who can get out quickly get out quickly.

This is the same reason that, if I have a full cart and the person behind me has 1-3 items, I will let them go ahead in line (I don't expect others to do this, but I have no problem doing it for others) - Why make everyone wait longer?