Okay, I know the young staff on the checkout at my local Woolworths grocery store are not hired for their ability to do more than stand and swipe products over a scanner, but tonight was really stretching the levels of “WTF?”…
With ~15 items on the belt and 7 bags to put the items into, the checkout lad initially tried loading everything into a single bag. In the first bag, he first loaded a 2.4L fruit juice bottle, then a second. As he scanned the third bottle and went to put it in the bag, he was clearly moving items around ready to try and get more inside the bag. The bags are not engineered to carry excessive load so I quickly interjected and said “just two bottles in that bag, thanks!” which made him stop. Briefly. Before putting the third bottle into the bag…
Again I stopped him and explained more fully this time: “we have lots of bags so there’s no need to put more than two bottles in because otherwise it’s too heavy and the bag will break“. He seemed to understand, and put the third bottle into a second bag and I assumed he’d keep loading that second bag.
No.
Instead he took me at my word and didn’t load more than two bottles into the first bag, but did then start putting large 500g soup tins into the bag. I got quite short with him at this point and pointedly (and somewhat loudly) told him to stop, explaining that the two bottles was all I wanted in the bag.
Aha! The light of recognition went off in his eyes! ”Just the two in the bag then?” he asked, and I replied that was correct. I’d taken the soup tins off him and put them in the second bag with the third bottle, then turned around to put it in the trolley.
As I turned back, he was scanning more items and loading them into a third bag as I expected. What I didn’t expect was for him to now stop putting more than two items in a bag. Apparently unable to recognise the difference between 2 x 2.4L bottles of juice vs 2 x 100g packets of marshmallows, he was now only loading 2 items in each bag…
He looked up at me after each bag quizzically, unable to comprehend why I would want to put only two items in each bag, and by that stage all I could really do was stare at him, slack-jawed as he disregarded the logical sorting of items on the conveyor belt and put two items per bag. Thus it was we ended in a scenario where each of us thought the other was a cretin because he could not differentiate between “don’t overload the bags with many heavy items” vs “don’t put more than a certain number of items in each bag, regardless of weight”.
Dear Woolworths – I repeat my request for aptitude testing…
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