Metalwolf wrote:
I work at a supermarket. One of my jobs is a lot person, where I go out and collect carts the people leave behind after they're done shopping.
One of the rules of the company is that I can't push more then 5 carts at a time (this is to prevent back injury or something). This is fine when you have 2 people out in the lot, but when you are the only person doing it and there are people leaving them in all places but the place they are supposed to go, it becomes a royal pain. Especially when it gets busy.
For one thing I am not tall enough to bend over for the injury (in fact I can count on one hand all the times that I have actually felt back pain while doing it) and also I was trained in how to do the pushing correctly.
Another one is for the lot people, we can't keep any money that we find outside. I can understand not keeping $1s, $5s, $10s and such, but they ask us to take quarters and pennies up to the service counter, because they think someone's gonna come in and claim them.
We also aren't allowed to recieve tips, even if the customer dearly wants to give it to us.
One thing that grates on my nerves badly, is we aren't allowed to tell the customers to not leave the carts outside the returns. The company is afraid they will get mad, and then leave us to shop at our competitors.
So whenever it's windy, or it's raining, loose carts go zooming into cars. People will also leave them in parking spaces, not bothering to walk the 20 feet to the returns and thus blocking a space. I can't always be outside to retrieve them, so they get out of hand pretty quickly.
I've had customers upset over the ill manners of these other people, but I tell them I can't do anything about it. Only they can, by writing a complaint slip and asking for signs to be put up.
I too, work in a grocery store and I agree with all of this (though we are allowed to push six carts, no more). I wish that we had the canadian cart system where they are coin operated carts and you return them to get your quarter back (as represented in
this comic). It also really irritates me that, when inside, my boss expects me to say hello and inquire into every customers shopping progress. Ninety-five percent of the time I feel that I am just going to annoy them unnessecarily, which would lead to a decrease in the likelihood of them shopping with us again.
Also, despite his insistance that our primary purpose there is customer service, it often seems that it is far more important to keep up appearances and follow certain irrational procedures than it is to actually try to service the customers efficiently and effectively.
05 Apr 2010, 8:18 pm
