Yesterday, we shared the heartwarming story of a Harris Teeter supermarket that let customers leave with carts full of free groceries and not force them to wait around for the registers to start working again. Yesterday evening, sort of the exact opposite of that happened to Dina when she tried to get through her shopping trip to Giant quickly by using the self-scan station. Trying to get out of a crowded grocery store “quickly” is tempting fate, doesn’t Dina know that?!

I live in [redacted] and went today to do some last minute shopping at Giant supermarket on [redacted]. The store was buzzing with customers, so I decided to use the self scanning wand. This way I could get out quickly.

After weighing every fruit and produce & filling my bags – I went to the self scanning line where you scan a bar code and set the scanning wand in its designated sleeve and it reads your purchases. A notice came on the screen – “wait for help”. I thought the whole idea was not to use “help”.

A store worker appeared. She had to scan my items again…. Again? what for? Oh, I have been selected for review by the computer. Fine. Ah…. she has to do it one item at the time by hand since her hand held scanner wasn’t working. Oh, and she also had to help the 5 other lines of people using self checking that were 4 people deep each- it would take just a second.

She scans few items that don’t scan properly – and she has to run and help other lines with problems. When she is back – instead of scanning the bar code on items, she types in every No. under the bar code and I start to see red. I thought I would never get out of there.

My blood pressure is finally coming down. I guess Giant is not a place to go if you are in a hurry.

Perhaps–and I don’t want to get too farfetched here–it would be a good idea to have more than one person helping customers at the self-scan stations during after-work hours,

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