I have already confessed my coupon habit here, but I need to make another confession now. OK, here it goes: I broke a fucking self-checkout register last week.
Who does that? Only homeless people and me. Awesome.
Let's rewind to last Tuesday when my boss and I left the office early. You see, I don't really like my job, but I do have a great boss because 1) She loves to shop with coupons too, and 2) She can be easily persuaded to leave the office for anything coupon-related.
Bless her heart.
Anyway, we both had rather long lists of items we wanted to scope out at the store to see if they were priced low enough for us to utilize our personal coupon treasuries. As fortune would have it, pretty much everything was on sale that day. It was kind of a great day for any coupon mavens out there.
Except for me.
Now, we have a very particular strategy when we are ready to checkout and purchase our groceries. Rather than going to an actual cashier's lane, we prefer to head to the big self-checkout lanes where there isn't an item limit, nor is there any person (like a cashier or a bagger) to judge us about the weird shit we are buying.
When one of us has finished scanning all of our items and begins scanning the coupons, the other person will start bagging the groceries and putting them back in the cart. It's total teamwork. Because she is my boss, I always let her scan her items first because that is what underlings do, right? On that particular day, it wasn't like I had 4 things of ice cream (ON SALE!) melting in my cart or anything - except I did. But whatever, it's the price I pay for having a cool enough boss to let me coupon to my heart's content.
As I started scanning my items through the little red-light-laser-thingy, I noticed the machine was a little sluggish, but no big deal. I would just give it a moment or two in between scans, and everything seemed to be going well until I got to the eggs.
The motherfucking eggs.
Not only would the eggs not scan, but the entire screen froze. It was completely and utterly frozen at $164.80. I hadn't even scanned my coupons yet! My stomach dropped because there was already another coupon-crazy woman waiting in my lane, and my groceries were already bagged and inside my cart.
At this point, I started to sweat profusely, and as I waved down the self-checkout lane cashier lady assistant person, I felt my non-waterproof mascara pooling under my eyes.
"Yes, ma'am, how can I help you?"
"The machine seems to be frozen. I'm not sure what happened."
"Oh, you can pay the total at my computer right back there."
"OK, great, but, um, I have some coupons I'd like to use."
"That shouldn't be a problem. How many do you have?"
"Um, a lot."
"Like how many?"
"Like this entire gallon-size Ziploc bag."
"...oh."
Quite a few people were looking in my direction by now. I was definitely panicking a little bit because my boss clearly wanted to leave since all her groceries were scanned, discounted, and paid for, and there were now distinct murmurs of my idiocy floating around the store.
I'm just not the person who random strangers hate on in public, you know? I always keep my voice down when I'm talking on my cell phone. I don't have screaming children hanging off of me in the dressing room. I don't cut people in line (Except that one time at a McDonald's drive-thru window, but he was a punk.) Why did that all have to change for me? Why did I have to become the cheap ass crazy lady who broke the machine at the grocery store?!
"Well, ma'am, we can wait for the machine to re-boot, and then re-scan all of your items."
"Um, and how long will that take?"
"About 30 minutes."
"30 MINUTES?!? What are my other options?"
"You can go to a cashier's lane, and she'll adjust the total."
Even though I really didn't want to do that, I went to a cashier's lane because holy crap, I just spent 3 hours shopping for all this shit, there was no way I was coming home without it. This new cashier was not happy to see me in the slightest, and when I showed her the coupons that I would like to use, I'm pretty sure she fainted and died on the inside.
With all that said and done, I saved $96.50 on my groceries, but I don't think I'm going back to that store any time soon. I will also never use a self-checkout lane again.
Ever.
I would rather face the humiliation of having my cashier witness my purchase of 14 boxes of tampons than break another one of those pieces of crap registers.
Needless to say, the first thing I did when I got home was insert my face into my melted carton of mint chocolate chip ice cream because that is how adults handle this sort of shit.
No comments:
Post a Comment