Everyone Wants The Betta Register

I work at a big chain pet store, and every week we do change outs for our betta fish, which are housed in cups as they cannot be housed in groups for obvious reasons.

Usually, the cashier on duty that day will be performing the water changes on up to 60 to 80 individual cups, which are stacked in a cart and taken out one by one, with the fish being put into new, fresher cups and given their food for the day in their new, clean homes. This usually entails two carts being set up at an unoccupied register, one for dirty fish and one for clean fish, and two massive buckets to hold the fresh and dirty water respectively. Not only are all of these things extremely hard to miss, but we’ve always made sure to block that particular register lane off, so it’s more obvious to people to bring their items to the open register lane — the one not covered in new cups, buckets, scrubbing supplies, and whatnot. This ensures that the cashier on duty can still perform check-outs and work on the fish when they’re not busy.

However, on multiple occasions, customers have looked directly at the empty register that has its light on, and then at the cluttered register that has fish containers on it and carts blocking it off, and assume that we want them to barge through the line and push everything currently on the occupied register off.

Whenever someone does this, they always look either annoyed or pleased with themselves, thinking that in some way I’ve “inconvenienced them” or that they’ve “helped me” by bringing their full carts to my blocked-off line, when it’s obvious I could move to the clear line and help them.