You Scan It

When I was about eight years old I was visiting my aunt and uncle in Nashville, Tennessee. My cousins were up from Alabama visiting also and we had just finished playing miniature golf one night. If you don't know my family there are two games which we get extremely competitive at. This is one of those games. The other is Monopoly which my grandmother insists that "People die playing games like that". Although it has never come to that there have been instances in both where certain seven year old boys are made to cry by their mothers. Anyway, we had just finished playing miniature golf when my aunt and mother decided that we needed to go to Kroger on the way home. Now at this time the whole "You-Scan-It" was very rare and really the only place that had it was Kroger. So my cousin, being about 13 at the time and very, very talkative, (he once out talked the Jehovah's Witness's) proceeded to yell over and over again in the parking lot "WE'RE GOING TO KROGER, WE'RE GOING TO KROGER". He even ran up to a concerned looking couple yelling how excited he was to be going to the grocery store.

Flash-forward to the present. This week actually. I have not had nearly the same exhilarating experiences with grocery stores as I did when I was eight. I've had two encounters with the You Scan It lines which I'm pretty sure have guaranteed that my mugshot is hanging on the "Watch Out For" bulletin board in the back room.

The first instance involved me buying about 20 pounds of cabbage. I had never brought produce before in my entire life so I was a little nervous to begin with. After scanning the first two heads of cabbage with no problems the third caused some issues. Some error blinked up on the screen and the light above the machine began flashing. So here comes unnamed Giant employee probably thinking "Here's another idiot that can't scan his groceries the correct way. So although it was a computer error and in no way was my fault she proceeded to scan the rest of my cabbage like the whole "You Scan It" line was a privilege that I had lost. Flustered as I was to be treated like my head was filled with the cabbage I was buying I almost forgot to pay. Which was not my intention at all. Had I really been trying to steal the 20 pounds of cabbage then why wouldn't I have just walked out with it? The problem was that she had but in and scanned the rest of my groceries, knocking me out of my routine and making me forget how to pay. She scanned the groceries! Make her pay!

The second time was only two nights later. I had gone on an ice cream run and had gotten my ice cream and a Jone's Soda. Jone's Sodas are bottled in glass. Remember that. Its gonna be important. So I scanned the ice cream and sent it down the conveyor belt. No issues. The Jones Soda I scanned and walked down and placed the GLASS bottle at the end of the conveyor belt. I walked back to the computer to pay. Here comes unnamed Giant employee. Apparently if the conveyor belt doesn't feel the weight of the item just purchased rolling down its inclined slope to the metal stopping point it won't process the purchase completely. I had upset the system by being concerned about the glass bottle breaking when it crashed into the metal stopper at the bottom of the grocery ski slope.

Screw you "You Scan It" I'll buy my groceries from a real person from now on!