Mrs. Put-Out and the Questions

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Sadly, at my store, the blinking light is to attract more customers to the Express Lane.

Seems as if it attracts more if the light is OFF and something is blocking the lane when I'm behind the kiosk, working cigarettes, because on an almost daily basis I'll have some moron wander over with their cart, move the spinner rack of chips out of the way, and start unloading their cart without so much as a "Are you open?"

It's to the point where I'm about to make a neon sign to hang around my neck reading "I am NOT a cashier. Do NOT ask me to open a register."

But then, knowing how braindead some of our customers can be, they wouldn't pay attention.

[dragonflygrrl]

And I was reminded by Brighid45 that at the Supercenter I used to work at, we had those "Lane Closed" chains to string across the register. I actually had a customer once unhook it and start unloading onto the belt, and "helpfully" point out that my chain was across the lane. I had to explain that I was closed. Can't remember the customer's reaction, in that case.

Not too long ago I was closing, had turned off the open sign and was grabbing my keys to lock the door when a guy came in and said, "Hey, did you know you don't have your open sign on? Hope it hasn't been like that all day! Hyuck, hyuck, hyuck." I just said, "Nope, just since I turned it off when we closed five minutes ago." He left without an argument, I'll give him that.

[karma_gypsy]

One customer came up to me while her husband held their place in line and asked the infamous, "Why don't you have more cashiers on registers here?" while looking like it's my fault.

Ugh, my mom did that last night! We were in Lowe's, she was buying carpet and my husband and I were with her. It was after eight and they had one register open (the manager I believe - he had a good three people in his line) and the self-checkout (no-one in line).

We'll, the carpet didn't have a bar-code and plus it was marked down - so hubby and I figured we couldn't go through the self-checkout, my mom didn't want to wait five minutes to wait for our turn. So she does the running back and forth looking for an open register (yet all the lights are off, go figure she didn't find one!)

We'll, she walks up to the person watching the Self-Checkout (a sweet, older lady). Mother asks if we can bring it through, lady says, "sure!" This happened only after, "why don't you have any more open cash registers?"

AAARRGH! Why did she ask that? I quickly reply, "because it's late. They don't have many registers going this late!" (I've never been in this particular store before - first time).

Nicer older lady replies, "yup, that's how it works!"

We bring the carpet through, and the lady punches it into the computer, well guess what? She's gotta get an override from guess who? The manager. He finishes up his line to come over to do the override (we wait about another 3 minutes or so). Needless to say, if my mom wasn't so impatient (I don't mean to tattle on her, but she's a repeat SC that I've had to wrangle in a time or two), we would have been out of the store much quicker. We should have just stayed in the line we were in, (we've learned this already by shopping at WinCo).

Oh well...