Grocery stores across the country have implemented limits on how many customers are allowed in at any one time. In order for these stores to be able to keep track of such things there are greeters at the entrances and exits counting people in and out. Once the limit is reached, customers have to queue up and wait until other customers have left before they can go in. To help facilitate this, barriers have been set up somewhat forcing customers to queue up in a serpentine formation.
You see these kinds of queues at airports, Kmart’s new middle of the store checkouts, Target, cinemas. Hell if you stick around at my work for long enough you’re bound to get a show. My point is this; serpentine queues are not a new thing and they’re definitely not as confusing as so many are making them out to be this past week.
I kid you not. I’ve spent more time at work the past week explaining to customers how to make their way through the queue than I have explaining literally anything to anyone. I once had to explain to my partner how to cut an onion. It brought us both to tears. Just like with the onion I didn’t think that simple instructions would be so hard to follow. We even put arrows on the floor and on the ropes directing people where to go. They still stop at the entrance to the queue and ask how they’re meant to get into the store.
There’s reasons why I shouldn’t be allowed to interact with people and questions like that are a major one. Though it appears that management seem to either enjoy or approve of how I deal with these kinds of questions since they pulled me from my department for door greeting duty. The exact wording they used; you’re scary and won’t put up with crap from people.
Honestly, that did it for me. For some being known as “the scary one” would be an insult and upsetting. With me however, comments like that will get you far. Food will get you even further.
Maybe it’s the region that I work in, people just haven’t figured out how certain things work. Or maybe they know how they work but once faced with them in a different setting to usual it suddenly becomes impossible to figure out.
Like cutting an onion. I’ve basically had to teach my partner how to cook, sure he could do steaks, pasta, toast, two-minute noodles. Two of those four things don’t actually count as cooking a meal and a third doesn’t count unless you’re actually putting the pasta with other ingredients.
Now he knew how to cut things. I asked him to cut an apple and he did it no problem. I then asked him to dice an apple, and after explaining what I meant by “dicing” he was able to do it. It wasn’t uniform at all but he got the basic concept. Then I present him with an onion and asked him to dice the onion. He was totally confused. I might as well have been giving him the instructions in Klingon.
It’s the same concept with the serpentine queue. People will stare at it confused as all hell, until they hear someone already going through the queue say “Oh it’s like the airport,” and then all of a sudden the haze clears and they realise what they need to do. For others though, who have maybe never been to a cinema or the airport, we have made arrows on the ground in tape and have also taped arrows printed on paper to the ropes, all in the effort to help guide people through (and maybe lessen the number of times I hear the words “which way do I go?”).
But alas, the instructions remain “unclear”.
Now that I’ve gotten over my main rant, and I hope that you’ve made it this far, here are a few other things I’ve had to constantly say over the last week, starting with the most frequent.
- Everything has been sanitised.
- Yes, especially the trolleys.
- Yes, I’m sure. I did them myself.
- No, you’ll have to enter through this way.
- Sure, continue to ignore me. You’ll end up here anyway.
- I see you see me. I know you heard me. You’re an ass.
- No this sanitising spray is not for hands, it’s for trolleys and baskets.
- Follow the arrows
- Yes, just like an obstacle course…with one very straight forward obstacle.
- How dare we force you to exercise.
- It won’t kill you, but I might.
- I don’t know if we have toilet paper left, I’ve been in this spot since we opened.
- Ah yes, cattle/sheep jokes. Very original. Always funny.
If you’ve read any of my other stuff or just know me in general then I’m sure you read that list with increasing degrees of sarcasm. Just as I intended it. If you didn’t, please, feel free to go back and read it again. It gets funnier if you do. Maybe. I might just be a special kind of twisted inside.
To wrap up this entry here’s another interaction I had with someone as they left the store yesterday.
Gentleman: You have a good weekend and stay safe 🙂
Me: Thank you, you too 🙂
Gentleman: *walks into giant poster board sign*
We both found this hilarious and it was one of my major take aways from yesterday, along with the conversation with a manager about how many toes were in the store at that precise moment.
Now think about this for just a minute. The max number of customers we’re allowed in the store during this whole pandemic is 275. We’re a very large store compared to others. One of our other branches only ten minutes away is only allowed 100. At the time that this conversation happened we had about 70ish customers and roughly 30 team members. Now assuming everyone has their 10 little piggies, that is 1000 toes.
This then led to the further questioning of do we imagine them as human sized toes or toe sized toes? and if they were human sized toes would they look like the thumb people from spy kids?
OR would they just be individual toes. Like the big toe is the daddy toe and then the next one is the mummy toe and then their three kiddy toes. Or daddy and daddy/ mummy and mummy. I’m not here to force hetero norms on toes, I’m just here to get to the bottom of this.
Now if the toes were individual human sized toes would they hop or shuffle? I guess the same can be asked of toe sized toes. Or crawling. I can’t imagine that human sized toes crawling would be very efficient but toe sized toes crawling might work. Just like babies. They crawl because they aren’t big enough or strong enough to walk yet, and if you’ve ever seen a baby when it learns to crawl, those little suckers move fast.
I’m now inclined to leave you with that mental image. I sea of toe sized toes, crawling towards you, a human sized toe. If you have nightmares because of this…well I’m starting up a support group because this brain child has also given me nightmares.
S.J Smith Books 