What's the Most Annoying Thing You've Rung Up?

[flybye023]

I used to work at a home improvement store and the most obnoxious thing I ever had to ring up was an entire chain-link fence.

At first glance you'd think it would be easy, right? just some chain-link rolls and posts. But, there are caps for the posts, latches for any gate(s) you want to put in, the gate itself, fasteners, nuts & bolts, wire, wire, and more wire, wire cutters, and let's not forget the privacy slats. And, all of the above have to be rung up one by one because we're not allowed to use the quantity key. Now, really think about how long a fence is...


So, what's the most annoying thing you've rung up?

[Golden Phoenix]

A male who was blatantly taking the mick:

A cucumber
A lage carrot (single)
A banana
A small marrow ()
Comdoms
KY Jelly
A soft porn dvd.

[ShadedWings]

A lady who decided she wanted a million of all of the items we carried that she had coupons for. Seriously.

She had three carts FULL. Probably wiped out our stock on several things. And then had a coupon for almost each item.

Her order went from around $400 to around $100.

It took me 45 min to ring up.

[MannersMakethMan]

A cream sponge cake made in the bakery is one that comes to mind.

Surely, you say, surely that can't have been bad?

Well, what they did was, they'd glue the barcode half around the corner of the packaging underneath the cake, so it wouldn't scan normally. You couldn't turn it over to read the second half without destroying the cake, so you had to literally hold this cake in the air balanced on your fingertips and read to manually enter the barcode.

They didn't even use the same barcode from one week to the next so you couldn't write it down, and since every flavour was different, you'd be performing the spinning plate trick with a customers cake every time they came through. Every time I saw one of those on the belt, I used to cringe knowing what was coming next.

[El Pollo Guerrera]

Not annoying, but an odd combination...

I used to work at a hardware chain (for a very short time), and one day a woman came in and loaded up on rat poison, mouse traps, insecticides and pickling jars...

I had a hard time not commenting...

[Red_Dazes]

Luggage... I hate luggage. Not only do we have to manually scan it... but we also get to play the game of try and balance the suitcase which is bigger than you on the counter to remove the security tag. And barely anyone buys just ONE piece. *shudders*

And baskets. By themselves seem fine. But our stock team has a habit of nesting the baskets... which means some one will come up with a basket and the 3-4 subsequently smaller baskets in side of it. Thinking they only have to pay for 1...

Pillows... take up the whole counter... and I have to scan each one separately... people will buy ten of the same pillow... and just pile them on the counter...grrr

[casey13]

Non-doubling coupons on double coupons day. These people come in and buy about a 100 or so of five different items with a shitload of coupons for each item. Then we realized that it's non-doubling coupons. They throw a hissy fit and decide they don't want the items after all.

[Nashida]

Probably when the pool store starts it's pool closing run...if you bought type A of our pool covers you got a cover drain free, but if you bought type B you got a chem kit for $70 (retail was about $110) and the drain for free. Anything else you bought got tacked on to the price of the cover.

This doesn't sound so bad, but when a person comes up with two carts of stuff, and one of them is just pool closing supplies, you know it's going to take a while.

Thankfully the salespeople had fill-in-the-blank checklists for the covers and supplies with all the PLU numbers on it, so all they had to do was check off what the customer bought and the quantity was written in, which helped soothe the pain. But only a little.

[Basher]

I used to work in a truck-parts store. A lot of the parts were heavy, and we had procedures for handling most of them..carts and trolleys and such. One time, the owner got a good deal on winches (you know, those things with the extendable cables and hooks to pull trucks out of the mud, etc.) and so we received 100 of these things, each weighed about 150lbs. It was pretty obvious why it was "a good deal" - the packaging fell apart as soon as you looked at it. Once it ejected from the loose box, it was like handling a greased pig with very sharp edges. We hated those things and it took forever to rid of 100 of them. Toward the end, we offered "free installation" on them, which meant we had to balance the greased pigs on the fronts of the trucks while the lottery loser had to crawl underneath and bolt it fast. No, we never injured anyone seriously, but it was a close-run thing.

[DGoddessChardonnay]

Frozen turkeys and 10 lb buckets of chitterlings.

They become messy as they start thawing and make the biggest, stinkinest mess on the counter (chitterlings smell like )

I used to dread either Homecoming Weekend for the nearby technical university or Thanksgiving back at the little WD store . . . everybody and their brother would be buying that stuff up like it was the end of the world.

Pork stomachs don't smell any better than chitterlings either. . . that's another item they'd buy up during Homecoming . . . and half the time the scan labels would be wet and it would be hard to make out all the numbers on the bottom if it wouldn't scan.

[JustaCashier]

At the hardware store, there were occasions that some of the rolls of hardware cloth (metal fencing/screening type material) the product label with the UPC, was wrapped in the hardware cloth, blocking part of the UPC. The roll was then wrapped in plastic. Had to tear the plastic enough, to be able to move the label to scan, or even to read the UPC number, which in many cases couldn't be fully deciphered without opening the package, due to being blocked by the wire.

Also there, we had one particular brand of electrical fittings, that had a series of blemished UPC's printed on the label. They were unscannable, and again, the blemish usually involved at least one of the UPC digits, and it too, couldn't be deciphered. I'd get so pissed at the lack of quality control on the part of the whoever printed the labels. We ran into a similar situation, sometime later, with a line of plumbing parts, IIRC.

Another option would be to enter a part number into the POS, but that was a crapshoot, because that wouldn't always work. I used to go back and forth with the electrical dept lead on that, asking him to have his people put tags on the items with the blemished UPC's, and he say "just put in the part number". I tried to explain that only worked occasionally, but in never got through to him.

Also, thanks to the programmers of our POS, there were inconsistencies in the POS recognizing part numbers. For example, a part number (all of these examples involve the indicated part number being imprinted on the product with the hyphen) such as 123-456 may work when input as such. But, a part number of 234-567 would only be accepted into the POS as 234 564, or, a part number of 345-678 would only be accepted into the POS as 345678. OR, *none* of those options might work!


When I was at my photo processing job, and we'd have the occasional huge order pictures of anywhere from 20-50 rolls of film come back from our Lab, it would take forever to ring those customers out. Especially a drag at the times of day when there was only one of us on duty, and we had other customers waiting. Each package of pics had to be individually scanned, making sure envelope number, and the price on the package label matched that on the screen, and correct the price when neccesary, (which was quite often) to reflect any+/- of prints in a particular package. In those cases, we would often give the customer a call ahead of time, explain the situation, and try to get them to commit to coming in around a certain time to pick them up, and we would scan their order out ahead of time in one of our only two POS computers, and just leave it pending until the customer came in and paid, thus leaving only one POS to process all other incoming/outgoing orders.

That would work out okay, on may occasions. But there were the times we'd get busy with multiple other customers, and would have to void out the big order, thereby not only wasting all the time in pre-ringing it, but wasting a mile of carbonless, duplicate receipt paper as well. Not to mention worrying about getting chewed out by a supervisor for doing it. Then, of course, the whole damn order would have to be rescanned, again checking prices, as this POS system dated back to at least the mid-90's, and had no suspense feature.

I'm sure there's more, but I'll have to wrack my brain, and will add another post if I come up with anything.

Mike

[JustaCashier]

Not annoying, but an odd combination....

.....one day a woman came in and loaded up on rat poison, mouse traps, insecticides and pickling jars...

Ahhhhhh.....nothing like a pickled rat to go along with that big ol' frosty mug of ice cold beer, at the tavern!


I try to avoid the ones killed with rat poison though.

Gives me indigestion....

Mike

[dalesys]

rat = 3p
rat with sauce = 5p

"How come it's almost twice as much with sauce?"

"Ever eaten a rat without sauce?"

[pssorens]

20 sheets of plywood all loaded onto the lumber cart with the UPC down.

[Android Kaeli]

Frames and yarn, I hate both -- especially yarn. It's not really all that bad when people buy a couple of each but when there's two buggies ( carts ) full of each.....