Beef Sack

I try to use these cloth grocery bags to be a good steward of the environment and offset my 25 year old 50% efficient furnace.

I also shop at Super Walmart because I’m supporting a family of almost 4 on one salary. (What would I do with another $4500 a month. That’s another post itself.)

Last night I was at Super Walmart and I go to checkout with this 45-55 year old woman. It’s her last checkout of the night and she turns off her light. She looks at my cloth bags and gives this defeated look like I jus shot her dog.

She says something like she’s not very good with these and doesn’t really know how to use them. I tell her to just chock them full of stuff because they aren’t 0.00001mm thick like their shitty plastic bags.

She explains that they’re trained a certain way to bag and blah blah blah. I’m not asking her to operate a fucking pipelayer, it’s a bag with four sides and a bottom, it doesn’t require extensive training to use. I begin to think she must be one of those people that needs to read the instructions on the side of Poptarts.

I just keep loading my stuff on the belt and let her get some OTJT. She keeps struggling through it and another cashier comes around and “gives her a hand”. I keep watching her much like I’m at a zoo watching monkey’s learn how to use tools for the first time.

I give her a handy suggestion. “Since Walmart sells their own cloth bags in an attempt to be “green” why don’t you suggest to one of your supervisors they give you a little station to set cloth bags to help you out?”

They wouldn’t do that she tells me, since only a few people use these. I could have just nabbed her a promotion and she throws it away.

I continue to watch, much like passing a bloody car accident, my jaw drops and drool begins to form in the crack of my mouth. I’m snapped out of it as she scans my ground beef, puts it back behind the scanner, scans some other things and then re-scans it. I tell her she double scanned my beef. She tells me she didn’t. All the fight in me is drained post hockey playoff so I just say fuck it, I’ll go to the service desk after and get my money.

We’re nearing the finish line and she’s getting a bit better with the combined brainpower of TWO Walmart employee’s aiding her.

She says something along the lines of “Oh, there’s a science to it.”

Sorry lady, just like Creationism, there’s no science here. Just what two-year-olds manage to do every day, stuffing things into a bag.

I head up to the service desk to get my $3.72 back for the double scanned beef. There’s a 20 something girl working at the desk. I tell her about the double scan, and she asks how it happened. I explain the cloth bags flustered my cashier. She chuckles and says they aren’t all that bad and doesn’t even make me prove I’ve only got one tube of ground beef in my sack. (That’s a colloquial term: Sack, not a Wisconsin term).

The lesson: Don’t go to middle to older aged people if you have cloth bags at Walmart, they can’t handle deviating from their precious plastic bags.