From: turtlecage

The following events took place a few hours after the previous tale.

So I'm ringing up items and bagging them, small-talking with customers, and having an otherwise pleasant time despite all the dummies. Then a girl who looked about 16 or 17 walks up with a cart full of items, and then stops, and stares at me.

"Do you have a question?" I asked.

"So do I just like... put the stuff up there?" She said, and pointed at the belt. I couldn't suppress my um.

"Um... yeah." I said.

She started placing the items on the belt and made a little jump when the belt started moving. It was like she had never gone shopping before.

She had a lot of items so it took me a few minutes to bag them all. Finally I gave her the total which was well over $100

And again, she stared at me. I repeated the total, hoping to kickstart her brain into working.

Dumbfounded I asked, in my happy retail voice,

"Will you be paying with a card? Cash? Check?"

"Oh, I'm not paying for it, my mom is." She said. I looked around the store and saw two annoyed-looking customers in line behind her, and a few other customers roaming the store and shopping. But the elusive 'mom' was nowhere to be found.

"Okay." I said. "Where is she?"

"I don't know." She said.

Now I was beginning to get frustrated. The post void process is a tedious one at my store. You have to call a manager up, who usually takes forever to get up to the front, who has to type in their codes, void it, move all the bags off to the side (while putting away any frozen items immediately), and by that time a line will have formed, backup needs to be called, you get the picture. So I give her one more chance.

"Can you find her real quick, so that these items can be paid for, and then I can ring out the rest of the customers?"

"No. My mom isn't done shopping yet, this is just my stuff."

I wouldn't be surprised then if physical steam actually came out of my ears. So I called for a backup cashier to help the poor shoppers in line behind this girl, called up my manager for a void, when finally the mom shows up out of nowhere.

"Sorry! Sorry I had to get a few more things." She said, and threw a few items on the belt. I added them to their total, and she pulled out a credit card and handed it to me.

"Actually the pinpad is on your side." I said. "Just swipe here."

I handed her back her card and she just stared at the machine.

"You can go ahead and swipe now..." I said. But swiper no swiping.

I took the card back, swiped it for her, asked her 'debit or credit?' and she had no clue what that meant. So I chose credit for her, gave her back the card, and told them to have a nice day.

The older gentleman behind them said as they were leaving, "It must be their first day in the world."

--turtlecage