Category: Life

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  • Grr. Amazon wants to stop paying me because they think I’ve been buying search keywords to link to them. No, I haven’t. Update: Two days later, they responded: it’s a bad form letter, and even if I were buying keywords, they’d only stop paying referral fees on those links.
  • More concerned than usual about person sneezing in stairway.
  • Bad idea: leaving your pay stub in the brochure holder by the ATM. WTF? Someone’s asking for identity theft.
  • Good deed for the day: tearing it into tiny pieces and tossing the confetti in the trash.

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I braved South Coast Plaza this Saturday, and ended up in the middle of the Spring Garden Show, which took up all the non-store space in the wing formerly known as Crystal Court. I ended up wandering the garden show for a bit.

First floor was mostly furniture and decorations. The second and third floor were mostly people selling or showing off plants of various types, tools, pots, etc., with half of the third floor dedicated entirely to orchids.

There was also this huge centerpiece in the middle of the mall. Coincidentally, I was looking through old photos from one of our trips to Las Vegas earlier that day and found the pictures of the giant flower-and-insect display in the Bellagio.

I’ve posted a few photos taken with my phone.

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While waiting in the 15-items-or-less line at the supermarket to buy a single carton of half & half, and waiting for the person in front of me to process a return (apparently not realizing that the purpose of the express lane is to handle simple transactions quickly, and if checks aren’t allowed, returns certainly shouldn’t be), I hit upon a solution to the problem of people misusing the express lane.

Once someone’s made it to the front, you can’t just send them back and tell them to get in another line, for several reasons:

  • It makes them even angrier than the people stuck behind them already are, making a scene. If it’s an honest mistake, they feel they’re being put upon. And if they’re trying to pull a fast one, they won’t like being caught.
  • Checkout lines are only set up for one-way traffic, so there’s a logistics problem.
  • And there’s that pesky “the customer is always right” meme.

My suggestion: Charge a small fee, maybe 10¢, for every item over 15 or whatever the limit is that you’ve chosen. Post it on the sign and treat it like a late fee. If you want, donate it to some charity so people will at least feel better about it.

  • It’s an economic incentive to discourage people from bringing in too many items and slowing down the express lane.
  • People stuck behind them will feel a little better knowing that hey, at least the dummy with 25 two-liter bottles of soda is getting dinged for it.
  • The line can still move forward smoothly.

Sure, you’ll still get people arguing “I didn’t notice I had 16 items!” (Just pay the ten cents already, and count more carefully next time.) And I’m sure there will be some people full of righteous indignation that how dare the store try to charge them for exercising their right as a consumer! It also won’t take care of people trying to handle returns through the express lane, but I expect that’s a less frequent problem.

So…good idea? Bad idea? Some horrible flaw that I missed? What do you think?

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