Things That Chap My Ass #42: Self-checkout lines

Today what’s chapping my ass is those asinine self-checkout lines popping up left and right in stores all over the place. What these stores are doing are replacing several checkers with these checkouts and a “supervisor”, in what can only be a concerted effort to ruin my day.

It never fails: someone will take a look at the seemingly interminable lines formed up behind the traditional checkouts and compare it to the line of zero people at the self-checkout and quickly run to that one before someone else gets there first. Keep in mind, these fuckers are the same cretins who were never able to program their VCR’s, and yet they still feel completely capable of handling a grocery-store scanner, touchscreen, coupons, ATM, and screaming brat in their buggy all at once. Meanwhile, because of my zero-tolerance policy towards things that piss me off, I get into the normal checkout line behind the grandmother with two buggies of groceries for her fourteen grandchildren (who are all present and engaged in what can only be called an all-out assault against the candy aisle), a herd of water buffalo talking on their cell phones and counting their food stamps, and the hot chick in a business suit who I’m certain is a complete Amazon in the bedroom. 20 minutes later, I’m walking out the door with my groceries and a fake phone number while the Jetson family in the checkout next door is still trying to get the machine to scan their coupons.

At this point, whoever I bitch to about the idiocy of those machines will respond with some variation of the following “[laugh] Yeah, i know, I hate people that don’t know how to use those! I always zip right through but…” I cut them off there because they’ve already made the mistake of letting me know that they’re not only an idiot, but also an idiot in denial. No, you don’t zip right through those checkouts. You want to TELL me that so I think you’re cool. You may even believe it, but that’s just because you had the sort of mother who always patted you on the head when you brought home that D- in Underwater Basketweaving (which also turned out to be your first choice for a career) and told you how proud she was of you for trying.

No, you’re not any better at those checkouts than the next guy. There’s a lot of scientific reasons for that, but most of them revolve around the user being an idiot so I’m not going to hash them all out. Suffice it to say that the next person who claims they actually can go through those lines and doesn’t have 10 years of being a cashier at Walmart under their belt had better be prepared for a brilliant tongue lashing.