posted
It isn't hard. I bagged groceries as my job in high school. Cold stuff together, heavy stuff on bottom, light stuff on top, bread in it's own bag. Evenly distribute load. It's like real-life tetris in a way.
Why do they screw up every time I buy groceries?
Today I had a cold thing in every bag instead of all the cold items in a bag together (none of the cold items being that heavy). Heavy stuff piled all into one bag so the plastic was straining at the handles.
And another thing.
Why, when you order chinese food, do they insist on giving you portion sizes large enough to feed a small African village?
Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
Well, I don't know about the first question, but the portions must be so that you can snack later. That stuff doesn't keep you satisfied for long....
Posts: 1843 | Registered: Aug 2003
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I don't know about grocery baggers. I always tell them exactly how I want the groceries, and grab the bread before they can touch it.
Now the Chinese food is easy. Many people, myself included, like it for breakfast the next morning. And some people will eat it all at once, having been conditioned by a certain fast food chain to SuperSize meals.
I still don't know how my favorite Chinese restaurant stays in business. They serve 7 different complete meals under $3.70. Their shrimp chow mein has many huge shrimp (isn't that an oxymoron?) in it for $3.95.
Posts: 1379 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
My favorite bit EVER in a Simpsons episode happened when Homer had to pack several items into the family car, including his family, from a bankruptcy sale at the big actor's place (the arnold knock-off dude). Suddenly, Homer sees everything in tetris shapes, the tetris music plays, and he packs the car.
posted
I don't know why no one knows how to bag groceries, but at all the stores I go to they just do it by how you put the items on the conveyer belt. I always put cold things together on the conveyer belt to try and get them all together.
But they do put all the meat together, which is pretty good. You forgot to mention the meat.
A good rule of thumb for ordering chinese is to order half of what you need. Of course, if there is only one of you, ordering the meal for half a person might be difficult. (Kind of like trying to put half an egg in a downsized recipe) Maybe you should stick to ordering dishes by themselves instead of meals? Posts: 8473 | Registered: Apr 2003
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posted
I have a similar pet peeve. Mine goes like this: Do the grocery packing people get paid according to how many bags they use? How come even though I only buy three items I wind up taking home four plastic bags.
When I make a planned grocery trip, I bring my canvas bags, plus a couple of old plastic grocery bags for the raw meat and eggs. The packers still try and use as many bags as is humanly possible, because they are used to bags that will break if you put more than two items in them, so they are unwilling to fill my canvas tote bags to their full capacity (which is, as you might guess, Full). I like my canvas bags because I don't own a car, and they mean that I can comfortably carry a week's worth of groceries the two blocks to my house.
In spite of my conservation efforts, I still have lots of extra plastic bags in my cupboards, because more often than not, the packer will take the plastic bags I brought in, put them in the trash, and put each package of meat and each box of eggs in TWO plastic bags. They also seem to think it's necessary to pack each shampoo or household cleanser in a separate plastic bag, because you know how those seals tend to break and leak all over the place if you look at them the wrong way!
That is why I always try to bag my own groceries. When my husband goes shopping (which he does most of the time these days), he also bags the groceries himself.
Of course, we are these crazy nuts who bring our own canvas grocery bags to the store, to save on paper and plastic bags.
posted
If I was still a bagger, I would feel inclined to speak to you picky customers as little as possible. Posts: 14 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Erik, there are a large number of people around here who are not very environmentally minded - we tend to get some strange looks from them. Posts: 5771 | Registered: Nov 2000
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Baggers aren't mind readers. Every person who comes in wants their groceries bagged differently. Some people insist on having three items per bag, and some want everything shoved into two bags, no matter what the items are. I've seen people get extremely angry over groceries I would consider bagged perfectly, and I've seen people rave over how good groceries were bagged that I thought were horrible. Not to mention they are probably fourteen years old and get paid minimum wage, so they just don't care. Also, chances are the majority of them have never actually transported bagged groceries home and unpacked them themselves. You'd be surprised how much of a difference that makes.
Posts: 4292 | Registered: Jan 2001
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posted
Baggers make minimum wage, or near enough. Most of them are high school kids and/or what most would call a "loser". God made a cosmic, infinite shit, and authorized all people to give it (or parts of it) away. Most of them do not. Laziness can be quite a sin. Posts: 1364 | Registered: Feb 2003
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quote:Why, when you order chinese food, do they insist on giving you portion sizes large enough to feed a small African village?
I don't know. At the community college I attended, we had an Asian restaurant on campus. I became addicted to the teriyaki chicken bowl. Problem was, they put in enough rice to feed half the Red Army. I never did get through even half of it. Then they started selling a smaller portion. Right. Never could eat all of that one, either.
Posts: 2454 | Registered: Jan 2003
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Danzig, I just have to say, you have achieved the height of comic genius in my estimation.
I don't know what's up with the Chinese food either, but I am perpetually thankful for the fact that I can spend $4 on dinner and eat half of it for lunch the next day. I feel sorry for people who don't have access to a fridge, because cold leftover Chinese is literally half the pleasure of the experience. mmmmmooshubeefyum
Posts: 1785 | Registered: May 1999
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Hey, I was a bagger and NOT a loser and DID give a shit. So there.
Although, the owner of the store had known me since I was two and was a family friend. Maybe it was the added pressure. Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
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posted
Sixteen years of grocery store experience... (but I'm feeling much better now)
Several reasons for the use of so many bags:
1)Lack of common sense. The customer will put the lightest things on the top of the cart (so they won't get squished). That means that they are the first thing to come down the line. Bart Baggit takes the first item down the line and puts it (a loaf of bread) in the bag. But he remembers his 15 minutes of bagging training and he knows that he can't put anything on top of bread, so he puts that bag aside and starts a new one. This time for the chips. Can't squish them either, so time for a new bag. Towards the end, all the heavy things come down the line. None of them will be squished, so they keep piling in the one HEAVY bag.
2) Only bagging one bag at a time. Part of the problem comes with the use of plastic bags. With paper bags, you would open up a bag, wait for some heavy things to put in before putting in the light things. If you got too many heavy things, you could open up another bag for the other heavy things before you topped them off with the light things. The plastic bags aren't rigid, so they don't stand up by themselves. So you have a bag rack. Typically (except for Walmart*) there is only one bag rack per checkstand, so after you get the first couple of items in, along comes a heavy item that needs to be on the bottom of it's sack, so you start a new one. But you can't top off like with the paper ones so you have a whole bunch of 3/4 empty sacks.
3) Lack of Faith. Unless they get a slice in them, the plastic bags are every bit as strong as the paper. (Even stronger when you consider that they don't fall apart when you put wet products in them.) But most people don't trust them, so they keep putting less in them than they can really hold.
4) Poor product arrangement. Because the bags are not rigid like paper bags, you have to arrange the products more carefully, so they don't topple out. Build walls with boxes on the short sides, cans in the middle, a few light items on top. 8-12 items per bag. Do it wrong, everything falls out, so next time you only put in 3-5 items.
*Special Super-Walmart Advice: Any Walmart employees out there? Hire some baggers and use more cashiers!!! Cost cutting managers are always skimping on the number of open checkouts, but the 20-30 dollars per hour you are saving by cutting down on 2-3 checkout lanes are costing you MUCH more than that in lost sales due to the L . O . N . G checkout lines. And every second the cashier is spending putting the groceries from a large order into the sack is time that could be used to help the next customer. Some minimum wage/high school age baggers on Saturdays would make all the difference in the world in your effeciency at the checkout. Many times I have needed just a few items and went to the more expensive Harris Teeter down the street because I refuse to wait 20 minutes in line to save 50¢ on two items. I am willing to suffer through it for the $30 I save when doing a big shopping job. And why are there always 5 blue-vested people standing/talking at that little podium in front of the checkstands? Can't at least one of them be helping me get out faster before my milk turns to yogurt right there in line?
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pwiscombe---I hear you! Stood in an abysmally long Wal-Mart line today. Ugh. I used to work in a Wal-Mart (at the jewelry counter, though), so I can say with some authority that most of the blue vesties at the podium thingie are managers. Or CSMs. I don't remember what CSM stands for, but I know it's a person who has keys and such for resetting annoying electronics alarms and performing managerial functions at registers.
Another thing that bugs me about Wal-Mart: why do they have staggered checkout lines, I mean, a cash register and then another cash register a few steps behind? Target does the same thing. It just seems to increase the traffic jams.
I also bagged groceries for a little while at the commissary (military grocery store). It's hard work! But I understood basic principles of engineering, and put the heavy things on the bottom.
One thing about the many bags, if the baggers are supposed to be tipped, one rule of thumb is a dollar per bag (which is complete hogwash, but is mentioned in an Army Etiquette book I have). If tipping the baggers is custom in your area, the increase in bags would make sense. It would be horrible and irritating and cheating, but it would make sense.
Posts: 1545 | Registered: May 2002
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posted
jexx, at the commissary, didn't you JUST work for tips? At Food Lion - where I worked as a kid - there was a no tipping policy. We had great baggers, several of which I taught. No more than 8 items to a bag, put the soft stuff on top, meat and cold seperate, paper or plastic as requested. And all this while the cashier is meeting a 28 item a minute scanning speed requirement! That more than the bagging bugs me today...these kids are slow, especially at your Sam's Club, BJ's and the like. Even the self checkout sucks nowadays, as it makes you go slow.
Posts: 5422 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
I am a compulsive food-arranger and bag-packing perfectionist. This is why I shop at Town & Country Foods which, in addition to offering fine Western Family products at ridiculously low prices, hand-writing their newspaper ads and having no annoying jingle music on the radio, doesn't hire baggers.
I arrange everything on the belt in the order I want it to come down.
I get to use paper bags without having to interrupt a plastic bagging already in process.
I can stack the boxes nicely as little walls around the sides of the paper bags, making sure each is sturdy enough to pass Tokyo building standards.
But then again, I am also anal and compulsive and care about these things. I can only assume that most grocery consumers don't.
Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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posted
You know, just about every time I see this thread, I want to create a Dobie entitled "Doesn't anyone know how to properly not split infinitives?" But I continue to choose not to do so.
Anyway, to the topic. I think Jeni and pwiscombe hit the most relevant points for me. One, people expect things done differently. One might want it organized so that she can put it all away easily when she gets home. Another prefers that the weight be evenly distributed among the bags so nothing is too heavy to carry. The third doesn't care, as long as his Doritos don't get crushed.
Two, I know that I put the heaviest stuff on the bottom of the cart to prevent stuff from getting crushed, but I try to be careful to (a) put the heavier stuff on the front of the conveyor when possible, and (b) put the stuff I want bagged together (frozen veggies, for example) together on the conveyor.
I'm also specific about choosing paper or plastic, depending on a number of factors (am I alone or with Mama or Mooselet or both, how many bags do I have at home for trash/recycling, what did I buy, etc.). I agree that people will often give me (to exaggerate) four bags for three items, when it's in plastic. However, they'll put eighteen plastic bags worth of groceries into one paper bag. I don't mind that so much, because part of what I'm thinking about is bringing the stuff in from the car. It's pretty difficult to carry more than one paper bag in each arm, no matter how heavy they are -- so make 'em heavy -- whereas with plastic bags I can carry fifteen of them per hand as long as someone else closes the back of the minivan. Sometimes I'll ask for paper in plastic, so I get the added strength, balance, and capacity, but still have handles. That's usually because I'm low on bags at home, though.
My real annoyance is at Costco, where they don't bag a dang thing. Sometimes they'll put stuff in a box, but either the box is too small and holds only two things anyway, or the box is huge and I can't lift it with all the stuff in it. But most often they'll just throw all the crap back into the cart, because theoretically they only sell big packages of junk anyway. Geez, that reminds me that I need to make a Costco run today. *groan*
posted
Ohh pppplllease can I have some wonderful Apples, pplease please give me some eggs. Come on. I need them. Pleease. I just love your bread, and some butter. Would you just let me have some food or I will starve. Pleaseeeeeee!
That is how you beg groceries.
Posts: 11895 | Registered: Apr 2002
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