what the….???

A trip to the grocery store is a guaranteed trip to frustration. Sometimes more so than others. Today is toward the top of the list.

With morning traffic, it takes me about 30 minutes to get to the grocery store I prefer. I filled my cart in 20 minutes. (The store only carries meat, dairy products and produce so there’s no time wasted looking at Ziploc bags or cereals or juice boxes.) Inevitably, I finish my shopping at the same time as everyone else in the store. Generally, there are 4 or 5 out of 10 cash registers open. Today when the whole world finished shopping simultaneously… there were two.

There was a third cashier who was farting around about getting her register open. I don’t know what she was doing, but it took her a good ten minutes to start ringing people up. During that ten minutes, she kept switching from one register to another… and the hopeful people in her line kept rushing their carts from register to register along with her. It was at least entertaining to watch.

I’d chosen a line that had a lot of people in it, but each had a relatively small amount to buy. The line did not move quickly. I toughed it out… comparing my progress to the people in the freshly opened cashier’s line. (She did not actually start checking people out until I was to the point of putting my food on the conveyor belt.) The woman in front of me was paying for her 6 items when a couple pushed their cart past me and the man started handing his items one by one to the cashier. Who took them and rang them up. I have no words to describe how far beyond simply annoying this transaction was. First, I was going to holler “What are you doing!?” Two things stopped me. I likely would not have understood the answer anyway… and the woman was pregnant so I could only assume that was what earned her the right to just cut in front of a line of people that snaked all the way back to the grape section. (There had to be 8 people in the line.) Oh, and one of the people they cut in front of was a more pregnant woman holding two small items to buy. It was annoying enough that they pushed to the front of the line. But then when I was finally being rung up, they didn’t move their stuff out of my way for me to bag. Sometimes it’s probably good I’m not fluent because holding my tongue was seriously getting difficult… so much so I was tempted to just spout off in English just to get it done.

Then, as I was trying to push the man out of my way so I could put my food away, it struck me. If there is some unwritten code that says pregnant women get to cut to the front of the long line in a grocery store… I don’t think it should apply to pregnant women who are not shopping alone. If she was having too much trouble standing up… her husband could have stood in line while she waited in the car. Or sat in the boulangerie next door enjoying a croissant and cafe.

It all got me to thinking. Maybe I need to steal one of those pillows they keep in dressing rooms at maternity stores. The ones to help you see what you’ll look like when you’re more pregnant so you can guess better while buying clothes. That could be my key to making grocery shopping at least go quicker. But I suppose that after a few months of that, the cashiers might start to wonder why it is I don’t have a baby and still am cutting to the front of the line. Still…. something to think about….

One Response to “what the….???”

  1. D.A.D. says:

    The cashiers seem to ignore blatant rudeness already. I’m sure they wouldn’t notice your term went the equivalent of an elephant’s.

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