A funny thing happened at the supermarket last night. It was rather busy, around 6:25 PM, and my mom and I were buying dinner for tonight, hoagies. Mmmmm, corned beef, honey turkey breast, pastrami, some oregano, some mayo, some alfalfa sprouts, some more oregano, all on a chewy soft white bun of pleasure....mmmmmm. But I digress. We had about thirty items in the shopping cart, too many to go in the express line. So, we head over to the least-full line, which contained one woman with about 15 items in her cart and 5 on the conveyor belt, and patiently waited for the woman to complete her transaction.
A few minutes later, the woman heads out the door to her car, but for some odd reason, there is no cashier to ring up our items. So, we pateintly wait a few more minutes, and then, lo and behold, a cashier come up to us and...says "I'm sorry, this register is closed." Sigh. So, we pack up our things into the cart, push it out of the register line, and find another line. Now, that isn't very good business, but what happens next is the smacker. Right after we leave, about five more people decide this line looks appetizing, so the line we were just in fills up. Now, maybe an absent cashier appears, or maybe they just decided that it was too good of a n oportunity to pass up, but for some reason, they put another cashier on duty in the line we just left, not three minutes after we were gone.
So, somewhat annoyed by this, my mom and I discussed the best hypothetical (we were both hungry, lazy procrastinators who'd rather just get the hell out of the store and eat) course of action to take would be. She said that there really is no point in doing anything about it. I said "Wait a second. We obviously can't change a few factors. We cannot change the fact that our checkout was moronically delayed. We can't change the fact that they made a bad business call. However, we can change one factor: our response. Now, if we complain to the managers, one of two probable things will most likely happen. Either they will take measures to ensure that on busy days, the checkout lines are fully staffed, or they'll do jack shit. But no matter what they do, we still get to rant and rave a bit, which will make us feel much better, so if I weren't so lazy, that's what I'd do. But, since I am, and since it's our turn to pay for our stuff, I think we'll just put our stuff on the conveyor belt. So, we did...but later, when we got home, we had a discussion over dinner about what SHOULD have been done. We agreed that Acme should have had the lines staffed, but that the matter was too petty to compain about. But we still don't know what to do about that radioactive squirrel hiding under the salad bar.