Odd check out behaviour

[wowfudge]

I'm beginning to think I must attract 'em at the check out after this lunchtime.

I put my few items of shopping on the conveyor behind the shopping of the woman in front and the 'next customer' sign she had already placed there. After a couple of minutes while the actually person at the till faffs over packing and paying, the woman before me in the queue takes a 'next customer' sign leans over my shopping and puts the sign behind my stuff. There is nobody behind me. Why would someone feel the need to do this? I think she might be the kind of person who thinks her younger neighbours need to open their curtains.

A few weeks ago the person behind me in a check out queue picked up my sushi from the conveyor, turned it over to read what was in it and asked the lad on the till where in the shop the sushi was on the shelves. She didn't ask me about it, or in fact say anything to me; just picked it up and turned it over!

I think the Aldi Lidl scenario is a proper thing, it happens to me all the time.

One woman did it and I started pushing the divider thing back so I could keep unloading my trolley. She just kept saying:

"Leave it please, it will be fine."

Except it clearly wasn't and eventually I pushed the divider and some of her stuff fell off the end of the conveyor. Oops.

DD politely picked it up and I said sorry etc but she just kept saying "how rude, his rude" really loudly.

I ended up saying "no dear you're the rude one for not letting me unload my shopping."

Bloody people.

Mrssnodge - apparently a Southend on Sea pizza takeaway has had to reissue all their leaflets, because they were offering an Aborigine pizza - and what is worse is that it was in their vegetarian section!

I hate it in lidl when people who have less than you just push in, if they were to say is it ok if I go first I only have one item I would say yes carry on, but when they just walk straight in front of you I find that rude. Also I hate the pressure they put on you in there, I know its not the staff on the tills fault. My dh used to work there and he would get told off for not having a quick enough scan rate because he used to give people time to unload the trolly.

OP, people can be funny at checkouts but here's what happened when I was shopping recently.

I was at a local supermarket and had checked out the 'reduced to clear' stuff first. Everything in my basket was 'reduced' including two rather lovely individual cupcakes which were going for a song.

As I browsed the reduced bread section next, a woman passing by took the cupcakes out of my basket (which I had laid on the floor so I would check out the bread). I turned and added some bread to my basket and she exclaimed "oh, I thought it was the reduced to clear basket, sorry" and put the cupcakes back. I hadn't even realised what she'd done. It was an honest mistake I suppose because everything in my basket had reduced stickers on, and I wasn't upset about it. I would have been very disappointed had I got to the checkout and discovered I'd 'lost' the cupcakes .

DH and I did our weekly shop once and had some veg on the conveyor belt, not a massive amount, just a normal amount of veg for 2 people in a weekly shop, along with all the other normal stuff (meat, cheese, bread etc).

Checkout assistant: Which one of you is the healthy one?
Me: Err well it's for both of us.
CA: You on a diet?
Me: No... Why?
CA: Just wondered why you were eating vegetables.
Me (laughing nervously): Well we make a lot of soup (not sure why I was trying to justify it!)
CA: Why do you bother? If you like soup we've got cans of Campbell's for 10p a tin in the reduced section.

Seriously if we'd cleared out the veg aisle I could understand but we probably had a bag of carrots, potatoes, broccoli, cauliflower and some parsnips!

I do the horizontal divider. It's actually to see exactly how anal dh is. He finds it almost impossible not to 'correct' the positioning

My African dh makes me die at the automatic checkout. He insists on speaking very politely to the disembodied voice.

"Please scan your Clubcard"
"Yes madame, my wife eez just getting eet out of 'er bag"
"Please take your goods from the bagging area"
"We weel queekly do zis, madame. And 'ev a nice day!"

People stare and I'm always red in the face.

I say thank you to the self service checkout. And the cashpoint. And the toaster.

At least I can be confident I have good manners.

I love doing the sideways divider thing. Waiting for someone to leave it horizontal. Then I know I've met an MNer.

GotToBeInIt that sounds like a Victoria Wood sketch!

I do the divider as well. The husband gets a cold stare in the distance going on and a twitch trying to ignore it

Ooo, the reduced aisle. Last year there was almost a full on fight in tescos when a bloke was taking things out of people's baskets. This little older lady (she was tiny, not being patronising) got very vocal at his shenanigans. Started edging towards Dh's trolley-he just stared at him and said "jog on" I was cracking up.

I am totally guilty of seeing things in other peoples shopping on the belt and wanting it, though I generally ask the customer where it was in the shop then dash to find it if I don't have DD with me I am also a 'next customer bar' mover, I do it to be helpful though as my time working in shops has lead me to believe that it is normal to have a nervous breakdown if you get to the till and there isn't a divider...

I can't stand the self service checkouts, my MiL insists on using them despite the fact that she also hates them on the odd occasion with a trolley of shopping not just a basket and then has a complete angry breakdown every time she bags too fast or something doesn't scan. I genuinely find supermarket shopping to be one of my most stressful outings of the week...

My first job was in a supermarket and I dreaded 'weird' fruit and veg coming through the tills, I'd have to casually check through the book of fruit and veg to find the code whilst furiously staring at the teeny pictures to see which one looked most like the item I'd been presented with, now I am that person who buys the weird fruit and veg and smiles evil at the young till operator who doesn't have a clue, it brings me almost as much glee as buying alcohol because I'm 25 and always get IDed but wait until they've eyed me awkwardly for a while and had to sheepishly ask me for ID before I get my drivers licence out... Though in Morrison's the other day I bought a few beers and the person put them through the till with no question, until my alcohol free wine flashed up the 21 warning and they IDed me for that... I went into full busy body mode and brought it up with the supervisor, not to get the kid into trouble, but because I was fairly outraged that the beers didn't bring the warning up on the system but my alcohol free drink did!

mermaid I'm almost certain that was a fairly normal occurrence for that woman, for her to not be concerned about leaving the child with a stranger and the child to not be worried about being left seems exceptionally unusual otherwise...

*** sorry to derail but Hatespiders how is DH leg, hope it is healing well.

Bloody it felt like I was in the middle of one!

What's all this about horizontal dividers? The dividers go horizontally i.e. across the conveyor belt anyway, don't they? Do you mean laying the divider down flat instead of standing up?

Lurkinghusband Nope believe it or not I've genuinely seen people doing the self-checkout with a trolley. I've watched them scan in every item and bag it, usually whilst I'm queuing to use the machine impatiently.

I remember two women openly laughing at me and rolling their eyes when I was a cashier because I mistook a clementine for a satsuma.

TheBooMonster alcohol free wine? Mind you, the strangest thing I've seen bring up an age restriction is jumbones. For dogs.

We were all putting the dividers length-ways last year, weren't we? I still do to wind up DH

I thought this thread might be about that

TheBooMonster haha! It must be your MIL I'm standing behind!

I no longer take my German DH to supermarkets. He is a complete odd bod. at check outs. Honestly, he has been known to unload peoples' shopping with them because, 'they are doing it so slowly and it is annoying!' On another occasion, he thoroughly alarmed one poor woman by randomly declaring: 'I am not enjoying that toothpaste you are using, I find it much too spicy, I tell my wife not to buy it. You should try this [holding up tooth paste in manner of cheesy advert] It is much better, I am finding.'

What is the age limit to buy a dog bone out of interest ?

Morrisons refused to accept the drivers licence of someone I know (who is from a European country).