Checkout Lanes

Since grocery shopping isn't frustrating enough, between weaving and drifting around other shoppers' carts and trying to hunt down that new product you saw on TV, grocery stores have taken the liberty of upgrading your levels of aggravation to maximum capacity just upon your exit, ensuring the rolling of your eyes, the pulling of your hair, and the cursing of your mouth before you go on with your merry life.

They accomplish this extraordinary feat via the checkout lanes. Here you'll find some of the most outrageous, thoughtless, inexperienced-in-societal-habitation human beings on the planet.

Sadly, as we undergo an economic recession, we simultaneously face a second recession: a recession in common sense. (Perhaps the two correlate somewhere down the line of cause of their existence?) Look at the customer with an overflowing shopping cart in the express lane for evidence. Or observe your cashier's handiwork -- now, I very well could be overestimating the inclusiveness of the definition of "common sense," but apparently today's definition does not include not bagging raw meat and dishwasher detergent together. (This happened to me recently.) Either that or the cashier's an idiot. My money's on the latter.

And how about that "express lane"? That's a hoax, isn't it? Even though the lane clearly states "20 items or less" [grammatical side note: it should state "fewer"], the cashiers will reject no one. I love the people who come up there asking, "I have 20 items, plus 30 -- do I qualify?" Sure, come on through.

I do applaud the "U-Scan" express lanes, as Kroger calls them, where you're basically entrusted to scan your own items, bag your own items, pay for your own items, and not steal anything. This seems like an ingenious means to expedite the checkout experience; unfortunately, through my innumerable hours waiting in these lanes, I can safely say that more than half of the "U-Scan" users cannot text message, much less independently work a touch-screen computer with a dozen pair of eyes watching and waiting.

There's also an extraordinary amount of closeness in customer proximity in checkout lanes. Frequently I'm feeling mounting pressure from the customer behind me in line. If her stack of shopping selections isn't toppling over onto mine without the appropriate space between our piles, then her shopping cart is on my heels with each progression I make up the lane. I think we all need to take a deep breath in the checkout lane and step back about two paces. I mean, really, we're not getting any closer to checking out by dry-humping each other in line.