Finally--something I can excel at

[Food Lady]

I've worked for this company for over 10 years and the customers have always complained that checking out is too slow. They're right. Sometimes it's understaffing, which in the last year or so the company has fixed. We have a lot more cashiers on than we used to. Sometimes it's due to slow cashiers, which has been commented on in surveys.

It's the latter the company is trying to fix. The checkout system itself measures each transaction we put through to see if it's fast enough. It takes into account things like the form of payment, how many items are in it, etc. If you are reasonably fast and use the little tricks, you can be fast enough at least 95% of the time, like me. The bare minimum is 88% and when I used to track it I was at 96%-98% usually. I haven't paid attention in a long time because several years ago I was told that even though the reports came up every week, no one was going to care unless I fell below 88%. It was rarely, if ever, mentioned. It was more important to be everyone's best friend.

Now it's going to be tracked again. People will know their scores now. Good, because our overall score for last year was right at 88%. That means we have some slow cashiers, and I don't mean the ones whose transactions take longer because they are signing people up for credit cards (system makes allowance for that). We obviously have people who don't know how to expedite a process.

I talked to the store manager today and told her I'm going to be her fast superstar. It's just a fact. I mentioned there are tricks to it and she asked what they were. I explained the little things I do and she said "We're going to have to get you to teach the other cashiers since they haven't been here as long and don't know these things!"

It feels good to have a work strength that will be appreciated now.

[muppet101]

I'm curious- what are these little things?

[Food Lady]

1) If a custy is writing a check, select that as payment form right away. It will know to give you extra time while they write it out.
2) Always, always, always have large bags opened and ready to go, as they aren't on the bag stand. I use tons of them every shift because you can put the large item in and fill with small, lightweight items. It cuts down on the amount of bags you use. Having to pull them off the roll and open them every single time wastes time.
3) If the customer isn't paying attention to the card reader--which happens way too often--kindly and helpfully direct him/her to push the button, sign, or whatever.
4) Pile of clothes: scan and set aside to deal with last. Don't take off hangers and bag them until the custy uses the card reader. You know if you do it inside of the transaction the customer will stand there staring and waiting for you and the whole thing will just take longer. I don't always follow this rule because I'm fast enough but it can be used to cut down the transaction running time if that helps someone.
5) Try to bag the heavy stuff first. Then you can put the lightweight bags on top. If you bag the bread and then the soda, you're going to have to wait for the customer to put the bread back in the cart before you can move the soda over. (We don't have conveyor belts.) Sometimes, though, I do the lightweight stuff first so I can put it way at the end of the counter. I'm not supposed to lift heavy stuff up, so I can't really move that over the divide in the countertop.
6) Have a place for everything that works for you. If it's different than you are used to because you are coming on after a coworker, take 20 seconds to move that pen or whatever.
7) Use both hands to scan and bag, like an assembly line. While I am putting one item in the bag my other hand is already reaching for the next thing. I don't need to be looking at the bag the whole time; I know where it is. Some cashiers don't do this.
8) Security cases: take them off before you start scanning or while the customer is paying. Don't stop your transaction to deal with them.

The whole goal of this is to shorten the time the transaction is running on the computer. As far as making the customers' wait shorter, it's anyone's guess.

[Teefies2]

7) Use both hands to scan and bag, like an assembly line. While I am putting one item in the bag my other hand is already reaching for the next thing. I don't need to be looking at the bag the whole time; I know where it is. Some cashiers don't do this.
.

That right there is what made me the fastest cashier in (my store at the time). Even though I worked the express lane (15 items or less <cough cough customers can't count>) I regularly had higher scores than those who worked the longer lanes. Our company required a minimum of 600 items per hour be scanned to keep your job. I would regularly get 8-900. Think about it .... 600 items per hour is 10 items scanned per minute - 1 per second. 800 items per hour is a little over 13 items per minute, not really that much more. But if you use both hands, know where your bags are, and pay attention, it can be done. It also helps if you're familiar enough with the products to know where the bar codes are, so you don't have to keep turning the item over or upside down to find the bar code.

Now that I read this over before posting it, I hope my math is right ... I think it is

[RealUnimportant]

One every 6 seconds; I'm putting that down to a typo

[BlaqueKatt]

2) Always, always, always have large bags opened and ready to go, as they aren't on the bag stand. I use tons of them every shift because you can put the large item in and fill with small, lightweight items. It cuts down on the amount of bags you use. Having to pull them off the roll and open them every single time wastes time.

Back when I was a bagger we were *assigned* to a lane and not supposed to move away from it, during down time the smart baggers opened and stacked
(kinda made them look like a sock you roll off your foot) the meat/produce bags (because they were in a box and on a roll 150 per roll, 3 rolls per box, box like a hybrid of aluminium foil/tissue box), opened and refolded paper bags, and had a stck of a couple dozen "paper in plastic" bags, and of course the people not prepping the bags whined about needing the cashier to help bag(the cashier did not have access to any bags, bags were under the end of the belt at *shock* the bagging station).

[wolfie]

Our company required a minimum of 600 items per hour be scanned to keep your job.

So delays caused by customers digging for exact change/arguing about prices, requiring the transaction to be paused for a price check/other factors outside your control can drop your average below 600 items/hour (due to "dead time" with no items being scanned) and cost you your job?

[Teefies2]

One every 6 seconds; I'm putting that down to a typo

You're correct. Thanks!

[Teefies2]

So delays caused by customers digging for exact change/arguing about prices, requiring the transaction to be paused for a price check/other factors outside your control can drop your average below 600 items/hour (due to "dead time" with no items being scanned) and cost you your job?

Well, yes. But not the first time it happens. Rather, they looked at a pattern .... did you have a bad day? Was the store slow? If it was busy (which my 24 hour store was) all the time and yet you consistently got below 600 items per hour, day in and day out, the discipline process started. I.E., a verbal discussion, a write up, final warning, and then termination. But no it didn't happen the first (or even the 20th time).

And they did eventually put in a "pause" option, but sadly that got misused and was taken away

[dalesys]

Excel at? You're a MS Office expert at a desk job? That's why they call the Excelent product a spreadseat.

[Irving Patrick Freleigh]

So delays caused by customers digging for exact change/arguing about prices, requiring the transaction to be paused for a price check/other factors outside your control can drop your average below 600 items/hour (due to "dead time" with no items being scanned) and cost you your job?

My guess is this isn't going to be very strictly enforced unless management really wants somebody gone for sucking at other parts of the job (till always being off, etc). Then it will be thrown in there to justify the firing.

Something like this would never work at my store. We usually only have 1-3 checklanes open at any time, and many of our customers are older. That means lots of check writers, change diggers and price-check demanders.

[Gerrinson]

Back when I was a register jockey, I used most of the tricks already listed in the OP, except my store didn't sell clothes, so I didn't have to deal with hangers and the like.

They used to measure our speed by Items Per Minute (IPM). The minimum required IPM was 25, with a targeted goal of 35 IPM.

When they started tracking the postings, there were a fair number of complaints and grumbling from my co-irkers as well as an investigation into a possible system error (there were none) because I was rocking 53 IPM, a full 18 IPM above the next fastest cashier in the store.

By the time they stopped tracking it, I had gone up to 58 IPM and person below me had come up to 43 IPM. The vast majority, of course, were floating at or just above the minimum required to keep your job.

My IPM basically couldn't go any higher because I kept having to stop and wait for the register to catch up - my scanning was so fast that I would max out the RAM that stored item info for the printer, causing it spew audible errors until it cleared the buffer.

[notalwaysright]

We have a daily productivity report, but I don't think anything on that is tracked to the point of firing if it sucks. There is another report which lists people doing lots of price overrides, and that is tracked. But unless you are truly being stupid or dishonest, you won't even know you were on the report. It WILL catch those dummies using one coupon 800 times. I know that the main cashiers do pay a little attention because sometimes corporate sends out these memos like "we know X items are not coming up on the correct sale, leave the signs and override for the customer." And then the cashier will do tons of overrides and get on the list. But nothing happens or anything, it's just another report that gets printed. Can we all say TPS report?

I think the big grocery store I go to has screens with numbers and colors, and those have something to do with how fast they're going. Maybe they took those down, though. The people who go the fastest are the ones who seem to have a specific routine. Like, scan rewards card, put coupons here, scan, scan, move frozen/heavy/chemical item over, finish, scan moved aside item, scan coupons, say total. We don't have plastic bags (so nothing to open except paper bags), and I almost always have my bags first on the belt, with my card and coupons on top. I have to say, most cashiers are super fast. It's the customers who slow them down. Last month the customer got her total and asked where her reward was. Cashier says it expired. Lady says (in that passive aggressive way) that it should have said it more clearly. In my head I'm like, "you had a whole MONTH to use that, and you're standing here wasting all our time now?"

[bainsidhe]

I was always one of the top scanners at my store, and though I'd like to think it was because I was just so awesome, it helped that hitting the SUBTOTAL key would pause the transaction. It was especially helpful when shifting unwieldy items, or when waiting for someone to hunt for their method of payment.

Some of the numbers you folks post here boggle the mind. Even on a busy and energetic day, I could never scan 35 items a minute, hour after hour.

[dendawg]

Excel at? You're a MS Office expert at a desk job?

Or maybe she's working for Across?