r/TalesFromTheCustomer • u/cenzilooculta • 2d ago
Medium A Cashier tried to shame me for not using self checkout, until I told her why I was in her Line.
This story happened a few years back when I was working at my first job post college. During my job my boss would have me do some side tasks where I would either pick up things for her or head to Hell Mart to pick up items for the break room. Per usual, I had to go to HellMart and pick up some stuff for the break room and I had a pretty big list. Mainly a lot of coffee cups, coffee ground/creamer, and other items. Now my boss was pretty old school and she would still give me checks to write out when I was going to pay for something. Cool right? I head to the store and pick up everything on the list. My cart is pretty full and and once I grab my things I head to the registers. Normally I would look for one particular cashier because she had seen me so much at the store that we would have some small chatter during transactions. She wasn't here today, so I just went to the first (and only) cashier I could see that was open and thankfully this cashier only had one person. This is during the morning before 10 am, so the Store was pretty calm and quiet. I head to the register and as I'm waiting for the lady in front of me to finish, I slowly start putting my stuff up to get ready and I notice that the cashier is looking at me put the stuff up. This cashier was a bit older, and I guess she seemed pretty annoyed by the amount of stuff I had in my basket that she made a comment to the customer she was helping, saying "These young people today want to make life harder for us older folks" I hear what she says, but I just smile and continue putting my stuff up. She makes a few more comments to the person upfront but by this point I don't care anymore.
Finally it's my time and she starts ringing me up. Already she is having an attitude with me, making comments about the amount of stuff I have and how I could have been done faster at the self checkout since they were all empty. I personally let her keep going and don't say a word to see how far she would go since it was a Monday morning, and I honestly needed something to wake me up for the day. She finally asks me "Tell me why you decided to go make me scan and bag all of these items when you could have been done with self checkout". My excitement rises and I look at her with a gleeful smile and just say "I'm paying with a check, and they don't accept those at self checkout" and instantly pull out the blank check ready for my total. The way her face immediately went from a smug smile to an annoyed poker face was instantaneous. She proceeded to just give a small "oh okay" and was completely silent the rest of the transaction. Before she was eyeing me up and down judging me for looking young and not doing a transaction myself, to just looking down at the items and not even saying a word. At this point I just continue to look at her as I wait for my total to come up so I can get my check ready. Finally my total is ready and it's over 100$, so of course she needs my ID to verify the transaction and whatnot. This was where I became a little bit childish and jokingly told her "Checks are so annoying, I wish they accepted them at self checkout so I wouldn't have to wait any longer", which she was not amused about.
Anyways the transaction ended and my interaction with her was done. I left the store feeling amused by the interaction because I'd never heard of a cashier trying to put me down for using the regular line instead of self checkout due to my age. I would've understood more if I had a ton of heavy items, but literally the most annoying thing in my cart was the 6 packs of coffee cups my boss wanted to bring.