The holiday season is finally over, and the lines at the checkout counters are back down to being almost bearable. I don’t know where the Three Wise Men bought their gifts for the Christ child, but if they had to stand in line at Walmart, they would probably never have started the gift-giving tradition.
Speaking of Walmart, this Christmas the lines were the least of my problems. For some reason, Walmart chose the holiday season of 2025 to renovate and completely reorganize the local store. As a result, five minutes after I entered, I couldn’t find my way back to the entrance doors. The hardware section is now where women’s clothing used to be. Sporting goods are now where kitchenware used to be. God knows where I might find the kitty litter, which was why I came to the store. I needed to use my handy pocket compass to find the checkout counters. For some reason, there are still 12 checkout counters, though I’ve never seen more than two cashiers on duty.
Years ago my local supermarket in California tried to improve the flow of customers to the checkout cashiers. Rather than the usual method of letting customers guess which line will be the fastest, the store tried requiring all the customers to form a single line, and the person in front would go to whichever cashier became available. I remember when I was in London back in the 70’s, the British used this system at their bus stops. Signs said “Form a Queue,” and the ever-polite and compliant Brits formed a single-file line that boarded the next bus in an orderly fashion. The only thing that screwed up the works was American tourists like me who had never seen the word “queue,” didn’t know how to pronounce it, and had no idea what it meant. As a Chicago native, I was more accustomed to the cattle stampede method of boarding a bus.
Apparently, the supermarket I mentioned didn’t have many British customers. In less than a week, the store caved in to complaints by customers who preferred the old method of guessing which line would move fastest. I, for one, have never had much success with this free-for-all method of selecting which line to stand in.
Logic would suggest that the line with the fewest carts would be fastest. But then you have to factor in how full each cart is. I consider myself lucky if I wind up behind someone with an almost empty cart. But then I find out that one of that customer’s items doesn’t have a price sticker. The cashier has to make a phone call to the back room and have a stock boy come up to the register so he can be sent to find one of the same items that has a price sticker on it. Then, after the intergalactic search is completed, I find out I am behind the last person on Earth who still pays for groceries with a personal check. That, of course, requires a supervisor’s approval. And to top it off, this customer insists on balancing her checkbook before leaving the checkout counter.
Automation doesn’t seem to have solved the problem. Take for instance my last visit to a McDonald’s. My daughter and I were driving from Los Angeles to Santa Cruz and needed to make a pit stop. McDonald’s generally has decent restrooms. The good news was that there was no line at the order counter. The bad news was that there was nobody staffing the order counter – just a sign saying we should order at one of the touch-screen kiosks. That also meant there was nobody to ask for the 4-digit security code to enter the restrooms. Setting all dignity aside, I yelled across the room to the cashier at the drive-thru window, and she yelled back the magic number.
While I was indisposed, my daughter decided to try her hand at ordering two cups of coffee using the new-fangled kiosk. Those things are never as user friendly as they claim. In researching for this article, I Googled “A User’s Guide to McDonald’s Self-Service Kiosks.” The result was a 7-page, single-spaced document. That’s a lot of heavy reading just to order two cups of coffee.
Without benefit of the user’s guide, my daughter spent 5 minutes declining offers to apply for the McDonald’s App, or donate to the Ronald McDonald House, and finally stumbled upon the “Drinks and Shakes” screen. There, she found the picture of a cup of coffee. Then she faced the added complication of wanting one with 2% lactose-free milk and the other with ordinary half and half. Finally, she was ready to pay. But when she scanned her credit card, the kiosk said it was currently unable to process credit cards. Worse yet, it directed her back to the order counter which was still unstaffed. Oh well, we had accomplished what we originally stopped for. We eventually found a Starbucks further down the road.
By the way, now that I’ve read that entire step-by-step user’s guide, I feel somewhat prepared to tackle the kiosk during my next visit. But, a word of caution. In those entire 7-pages of single-spaced text, there wasn’t a word about how to get the 4-digit security code to the restrooms.
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