I remember seeing a Carol Burnett sketch where she came up to a 12 items or less aisle, and was smugly told that the individual tomatoes in a fruits-n-veggies cellophane bag counted as three items, thus putting her over the limit. Her reaction? Banged the bag around for a minute then tossed it back to the checkout guy — “One bag of ketchup!”
If the stores really cared about it, it would be easy to make it work much better. Just a little bit of custom software for the cash registers, and a warning sign: “Register automatically adds 50c/item surcharge after first 12.”
That sounds like a great idea, but it only works with people unlikely to bring an inappropriate number of items to an express lane in the first place, because they read and they respect the rules. Anyone else would just bitch and moan about the store “stealing” from them until the staff were forced to refund those surcharges in droves. Plus, you would have to give the cashier the ability to turn that off so if they *invited* someone to their register with 13+ items (it’s rare, but it happens), the customer doesn’t have to pay more.
I’ve had customers come to me specifically to rub this in my face.
We’re not allowed to turn them away too
I remember seeing a Carol Burnett sketch where she came up to a 12 items or less aisle, and was smugly told that the individual tomatoes in a fruits-n-veggies cellophane bag counted as three items, thus putting her over the limit. Her reaction? Banged the bag around for a minute then tossed it back to the checkout guy — “One bag of ketchup!”
If the stores really cared about it, it would be easy to make it work much better. Just a little bit of custom software for the cash registers, and a warning sign: “Register automatically adds 50c/item surcharge after first 12.”
That sounds like a great idea, but it only works with people unlikely to bring an inappropriate number of items to an express lane in the first place, because they read and they respect the rules. Anyone else would just bitch and moan about the store “stealing” from them until the staff were forced to refund those surcharges in droves. Plus, you would have to give the cashier the ability to turn that off so if they *invited* someone to their register with 13+ items (it’s rare, but it happens), the customer doesn’t have to pay more.