It's Not 1935

[Food Lady]

....even though I’m dressed like it is. I can’t just punch prices into the cash register as I see fit. Two stories:

--At least this lady caught herself and stopped her rant, so she gets some points for that. At this point because of coupon fraud if the system does not accept it, I have to get a supervisor to approve it. This takes all of less than a minute and my sup was on the register next to mine, which was so easy. She was asking me a question before approving it (which she would have; I could tell it was fine but just needed an OK) when the customer interrupted to say “Ugh, I’ll just pay full price. If it’s gonna be this hard….” and that’s where she trailed off. Thirty seconds of her time and she could’ve had her dollar off.

--This guy came up with a bottle of cologne with no useable bar code. There was one from the factory, but it wasn’t something the register would recognize. Now, I admit I was annoyed with us for putting these out like that and I wasn’t the friendliest. I went to get a handheld scanner to look it up and the one I grabbed was frozen. Then I had to go get another. It didn’t recognize it at first. I told the guy that we didn’t sell it; that I didn’t know how it ended up in the store. (I was thinking someone bought it elsewhere and lost it in our store.) He told me there were a whole bunch of them and then *record scratch* “It’s $30; ring it in.” Nope. You don’t tell me how to do my job. I can do what he said but I’m not allowed. I told him that I cannot just punch in a price without an item number and that I’d have to go get it. I went toward the dept. & on the way I tried scanning it again and the item number did come up. (Even if someone’s a jerk I’ll go the extra mile.) I turned back and he had left. What was worse was some woman at my sup’s register kept staring at me the whole time she was there, like she was offended at me.

[Marmalady]

Oh darn, I remember this kind of thing so well from my days at the discount store.

Squinting at a price label that's too faint (either from age or not enough ink to start with) for the scanner to read, trying to see a code that I can type in, while the customer says helpful things like 'It's 3.99 - look, you can see how much it is'.

Yes, I can, but I can't just type a price in.

Then you'd hear 'I remember when you'd go into a shop and they'd just ring in how much something cost!'

Yes, I remember that too. I also remember when I could raise my leg backwards, lean back and touch my foot to my head but guess what? That don't happen any more either.

[Trixie]

We have a little bit of freedom when it comes to enter prices. Some items don't have price but it's in our system so we can enter something from there. Some stuff isn't in our system so some times we have to make something up. Worse comes to worse we can hard key it in but too much of that and you get pulled into the office for a talkin' to. Which really is nothing more than "Hey don't do that again, K?"

[MadMike]

'It's 3.99 - look, you can see how much it is'.

The supermarket where I worked in the late 80s didn't have scanners, so we actually did just key in the prices. And if something didn't have a tag on it, we usually asked the customer if they knew how much it was, and took their word for it. Crazy, I know...

We had our own type of unhelpful customers trying to be helpful though. Our registers didn't have scales, and if you bought produce that was sold by weight, you were supposed to have someone in that department weigh it and print out a label. Quite a few times, I'd get some unweighed produce, and the customer would try to help by telling me, "It's $x.xx a pound." Since I had no way to determine how much it weighed, that obviously didn't help.

One of the managers jokingly told me I should balance it in my hand and say, "Yeah, that feels like about 10 pounds!"

[Kit-Ginevra]

Yes, I remember that too. I also remember when I could raise my leg backwards, lean back and touch my foot to my head but guess what? That don't happen any more either.

It does if you remember to detach the leg first....

[Dreamstalker]

Quite a few times, I'd get some unweighed produce, and the customer would try to help by telling me, "It's $x.xx a pound." Since I had no way to determine how much it weighed, that obviously didn't help.

That happened a lot at my old store with packaged meat; either the meat juice ruined the pertinent parts of the sticker or it never got a sticker to begin with. A runner would get a package of the same product-- but obviously heavier--and have the cashier scan it quickly so the good barcode could be returned to the case. Not as if SC would notice a difference anyway, all they were focused on was the unit price.

I think the record for that trick was $4 or so difference.