I admit that I was kind of an a**hole in this story, but I don’t think it was completely unjustified. I was doing some shopping in a state that allows you to buy alcohol in grocery stores. This is not something I can do in my home state. As I approached the registers, I saw signs at the self-checkouts that said you could not buy alcohol or tobacco at the self-checkouts. That made sense, so I went further to find a manned register.

An employee in a blue vest and name tag stepped into my path.

Employee: “You can’t buy alcohol at self-checkout. You have to go to a regular register.”

Me: *With a polite smile* “I just saw the sign. I’m—”

Employee: “You have to go to a regular register.”

Me: “Yes… thank you.”

Employee: “You can’t—”

Me: “I got it, thank you.”

I pushed the cart past him before he could repeat himself again. I only got a few feet before I ran into another problem: there was only ONE manned register open, and the line was so long that it went through the main aisle and into the apparel section. I looked back at the employee.

At first, I thought he was working on a handheld device, then I saw that what he was holding had a colorful case and he was typing away.

Me: “Is it possible to get another cashier?”

Employee: *Rolls his eyes* “We’re short-staffed. If you want your alcohol, you’ll just have to wait your turn.” *Fake smile*

Me: “Oh. Okay.”

I took the alcohol out of my cart and put it on a nearby shelf. 

Employee: “Hey! You can put that back where you got it, you know.”

Me: “You said if I want it, I have to wait. I don’t want it bad enough to wait in a line ten people long.” *Shrugs* “Now I can go through self-checkout.”

I went to the self-checkout and was out of the store in under ten minutes. I passed the manned register and saw that every cart had alcohol and almost every cart was full.

I work at a grocery store and sometimes find these odd things out of place. The worst one was when someone put a bottle of root beer in our ice cream freezer. A glass bottle. Of course, it broke.

Have you ever tried to pick shards of glass out of frozen root beer? The process took long enough that by the end, the root beer had turned to slush, making the extraction process easier.

Fortunately, no ice cream was lost.

A couple approaches me with their items, and the woman instantly gives me a disgusted look.

Female Customer: “I don’t know. I don’t like his energy.”

Male Customer: “Oh, God, not this again. He’s fine!”

Female Customer: “He’s been around angry people all day! I don’t need all that ambient negative energy touching my fruits.”

Me: “I can hear you, ma’am. And I promise you the only way a customer can make me angry is to make incorrect assumptions about me.”

Male Customer: “Ha! He told you!”

Female Customer: “See?! He’s so negative! I need to surround myself with pure and positive energy!”

Male Customer: “You binge-watch murder documentaries and b****y reality shows, and you have a constantly updating group chat literally called ‘Gossip’.”

They checked out with me, but she kept her distance because of my “energy.”

Related:
I Don’t Have The Energy To Argue

I’m working in the produce section, stocking some new bananas, and a customer comes over to me.

Customer: “Did you know that humans eat more bananas than monkeys?”

Me: “No, sir, I didn’t know that.”

Customer: “It’s totally true. Think about it. When was the last time you ate a monkey?”

Me: “That’s… I…”

Customer: “This is why I shouldn’t shop without the wife…” *Wanders off*

This is a story my mom told me about my grandfather that happened in the late 1950s. Keep in mind that it was a different time back then.

My grandfather worked as a milkman his whole life. His company’s brand of milk was considered one of the better brands available, and for a very long time, it was only available via milkman. It was not in any grocery store — much to the grocery store’s dismay. The local grocery store kept asking — and then begging — the dairy company to please let them sell the milk in their store.

Finally, an agreement was made. The milk would be sold in the store, but with a small markup compared to the cost of delivery, so people would have an incentive to keep using the milkmen.

Where the dairy company went wrong was that the agreement on price was not in writing. So, while the price of milk started with a markup, that markup soon went away. The dairy company complained, but nothing changed. The grocery store kept the price at a lower amount.

The milkmen in particular were not happy with this; this was threatening their livelihoods. So, they all talked amongst themselves and made a plan. Throughout the next day, they gathered up their wives and kids and all headed over to the grocery store. Every adult grabbed a cart and started filling it with anything and everything nonperishable they could think of, from as many different aisles and shelves as possible. As each one finished piling their cart as high as humanly possible, they’d wheel it to the front, leave it there, and simply walk out. Soon, half of the store’s items were now go-backs, piled in a ton of carts, with the shelves looking bare and ragged. 

The next day, the milkmen checked the price of their milk in the store. No change. Their little demonstration hadn’t worked. So, they felt they had no choice. They stepped it up a notch. 

They now started taking all the perishables and anything that was supposed to be kept cool, cold, or hot and started “redistributing” these items for the grocery store. The ice cream belongs behind all the cereal boxes, right? And this fish should be put behind the cans of peas. The leaking steak goes on the top shelf behind the chips. And so on.

By the end of the day, the grocery store was looking at a ton of wastage while praying that they’d found all the starting-to-rot meat and fermenting dairy before things started to smell too much. 

The next day, the milkmen went back to check the price of milk again. The markup had, for some reason, been added back to the price. Nothing more was ever said about it from workers of either company. But that markup stayed on the milk from then on.