Strategic bakery purposes

[davidn]

Our supermarket introduced something great a while ago - little hand scanners that you pick up at the entrance, and carry around the floor with you to record the things that you take off the shelves. It's particularly good for us, because it means that we can just pack up our grannymobile practical shopping transport as we go around, scan the scanner at the self-service checkout instead of rescanning everything individually, and go straight through in thirty seconds.

Except what always happens when I'm there alone is that I scan it at the checkout, it flashes up "A checkout assistant is required to complete your order", asks me for my Stop & Shop number and then promises "Help is on the way" while the people in the eye-assaulting yellow shirts over at the Customer Service desk mill about uncertainly for any number of minutes. After leaving me standing blocking an express checkout for a while with the number sign flashing over my head in a beacon of distress, one of them will eventually sidle over, ask me to pull my stuff out of the bags so that they can rescan it in an audit process, then reset the transaction so that I can finally complete it myself.

And somehow I've never asked them why. Am I on some sort of special watch list for people who buy a suspicious amount of yoghurt? Do they have a quota of people they just need to slow down every so often? The time waiting for them to get around to coming over and then sift through my purchases makes it easily slower than it would be to go to a more conventional human-based checkout, but I still use it every time in the hope that it's got to let me through unchallenged sooner or later. And despite all this, I still just say a quick "thanks very much" to them as they turn their back and shuffle back to the desk.

This is something I feel the Americans are much better at.

Comments

[diarytypething.livejournal.com]

Are you buying a suspicious amount of yoghurt? You know, that kind of thing can look distinctly unpatriotic, especially when you're not a citizen and don't even own a credit card. Once they find out that you're importing foreign breakfast cereal they're going to start strip-searching.