Clean Up On Aisle Four

If you should ever see me in line at the grocery store....run screaming in the opposite direction. It is Murphy's Law that I *always* find the. slowest. line. ever. to check out in. What is funny about this is that even when I change my tactics for picking a line, I still chose wrong.

Tonight's latest example of this was that I found the shortest line, AND the woman directly in front of me only had maybe half a cart full of items. Score, right? Wrong. I neglected to look to see what the person in front of *her* had in their cart. This was a big mistake in my method.

The first woman's cart was literally overflowing with food. In fact, now that I think about it, the store was pretty packed for a Tuesday night. I wonder if it's because it is the first of the month and everyone got paid. I digress. This woman's cart was so full that by the time she pulled away her bags were piled on top of each other precariously enough that I wondered if half of her groceries might fall out of the cart. This would have been nothing, except this woman also had a million coupons. Again, no big deal except that some of her coupons did not ring through, requiring the checker to look through her already bagged stuff in vain. Eventually he printed copy of her receipt so far to look over. Finally, all of her stuff was bagged in reusable bags. I actually love, love, love reusable bags and use mine as often as possible. However, they do take longer to bag than the traditional plastic bags do.

All of this to say that I watched people in lines around me, who had gotten in line *after* me, go through their lanes and walk out of the store before I even started getting checked out. My luck with lines would have meant that had I left my lane to go to another, THAT lane would have then been the slowest.

Since I had a lot of time to stand there and think, I thought "why don't grocery stores have slow lanes? I mean they have "express" lanes. Why not "slow" lanes too? These would be for people with a lot of groceries, a lot of coupons, etc." Not sure any grocery store will take me up on that idea, but it could work.

Clean up on aisle four!
Erin