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Sunday, December 18, 2005
Lim: Bag your own
By Melanie T. Lim
Have you ever found yourself waiting in a supermarket queue?
Think about rush hour, weekends, holidays. You find queues upon queues of annoyed and sometimes, angry shoppers waiting for the cashier to ring up their purchases.
My sister once found herself in such a queue and she almost screamed in frustration because she lined up in the wrong queue and found out only 45 minutes later. The only thing that stopped her from going ballistic, she said, was a story I recounted to her several months back about a woman who ranted and raved about waiting in a queue and ended up looking like a madwoman to the rest of us, shoppers.
Well, I can understand the sentiments of the madwomen among us, actually. And I can understand the inevitability of long queues during certain times of the week or year.
What I don’t understand is how many of us can be so shamelessly lazy and indifferent to a situation like this.
In light of mile-long queues, I would imagine that the least a customer could do is to get ready to unload her groceries when her turn comes and have her wallet out as the cashier rings up the goods so she can readily hand in her money or credit card when the cashier is done.
In short, we, customers, should do everything possible to expedite our transaction so that others after us should not have to wait even longer.
More importantly, what most customers should DO during a situation like this is to actually DO something useful while the cashier rings up the goods. Customers can actually START bagging their groceries to help speed things up.
I know this sounds preposterous to most people. After all, I’ve waited in a number of supermarket queues for a number of years and aside from myself, I don’t recall more than five people who have ever attempted to bag their own groceries. And this just blows my mind away.
I’m almost always dying to scream at these people to make themselves useful. It isn’t likely that they’re going to injure a tendon by bagging their own groceries. But somehow it doesn’t seem to be in our culture “to bag our own groceries.” I think, we actually feel it’s part of what we’ve paid for. And it is, except, that once in a while, it wouldn’t really hurt to be a bit more helpful than usual.
When you bag your own groceries during rush hour, you get to work out your biceps, make the underpaid, overworked cashier smile and get everyone home as fast as possible. Wouldn’t that actually be the best way to spread the holiday cheer?
Try bagging your own groceries this holiday season and find out how good it actually feels.
(sunstarcebucolumnist@yahoo.com)
(December 18, 2005 issue)
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