Usually I don't complain in my posts as life is difficult as it is, don't want to burden anyone with negative posts, but sometimes things happen and cases stuck in my head for hours, like this one I'm going to share with you today.
We live in an era, where the way products are reaching the final customer is changing with a breakneck speed. The reasons is to make shopping easier, as well as reduce costs, just to name a couple. What seemed unimaginable a decade or two ago is maybe outdated already today, because something new had just been implemented to replace the old method, but serving customers the old fashion way is still available here and there, in some countries more than in the others.
When shopping, I usually go for pre-packaged food, for a good reason, but sometimes I have no choice, but to go to the sales personnel to get what I want.
Last week I needed cottage cheese, because I wanted to bake a cake and the cheese you get in packs is so wet that it's basically useless for baking. As it's not the first time I need cheese for baking, I have a place where they are selling the preferred quality cheese, but they get it in big buckets and you have to ask them to serve you.
So I approached the lady and said I need 250g of cheese. She picked up two plastic boxes of different sizes and asked me which one I want. This was the moment when I started to roll my eyes because stupid questions are annoying, but I took a deep breath, decided to be polite and said I don't know, don't have the experience to know in which box 250g cheese would fit, letting the lady know politely that she should know, she is paid to make this decision, not me.
She picked up the bigger one and put a big spoon of cheese in it. When I saw how much she took out of the bucket, knew right away that it will be too much, but again, I'm not the one who's selling cheese, I have no experience, so I kept my mouth shot. She places the box on the scale and boom, the scale showed 530g. Reminder, I asked for 250g, so the quantity was more than double.
Next, she looked at me, waiting for me to make a decision, which was funny as the quantity she had in the box was more than double of what I asked, you don't have t be a genius to notice that. I told her I need 250g. She then took out some and put the box back on the scale, but it was 380g, still more than I needed. She looked at me again and asked me if it's ok. I took another deep breath and told her it's not ok as I asked for 250g.
What happened next is something that would have never crossed my mind. She told me, I should have asked for the smaller box, not the big one. WTF!!!?? Her remark left me speechless for a moment, but it was too much for me and decided to speak up, so I told her I didn't choose the box, she did, because I don't have experience, she has (or should have).
The next obvious move (in my eyes obviously) would have been to take some more out of the box, till it reaches the quantity I asked for, but that's definitely not what happened. She took the small box, started to transfer some of the cheese to the small box and while she was doing it, she told me that the plastic box weighs too, and that she knows it because she used to work at a pastry shop and they needed to weigh the boxes before filling them with biscuits and other stuff.
I was just standing there, looking at her shocked, thinking "really"? I wanted to tell her that if she used to work with these boxes, she should know how much a box weighs as sure as hell it's not 280g, the surplus the scale showed the first time, but decided to keep my opinion to myself this time. So I finally got the quantity I asked for, or close to it as it was still more, but was glad I finally got my cheese.
On my way home I was thinking, how the hell can people like her fill this position when they have no clue about how to serve clients and how the hell can that shop survive as losing customers with services like her provided must be on a daily bases.
I didn't understand why she transferred the cheese to the small box. The big box was already wasted, you cant give it to another customer, so why waste another one? Unless she was afraid of getting in trouble for not knowing which box to use, as the cashier could still see the box, when I paid.
Now, after reading what I wrote above, you may think this is just another tantrum to get some attention and play the victim, as so many are doing it here on a daily bases, but trust me, it's not.
If you can see past this event and see what is going on, on a bigger scale, you get shocked. Workers have been complaining about losing jobs because apps are taking over. This is a never ending discussion with pros and cons, but when you come across workers like her, you wish you could just take a box off the shelf, scan the code, pay and leave.
I left not just disappointed, but angry as well as I can't understand how can someone be so ignorant, but the biggest problem is, I am firmly convinced the minute I turned my back to her, she started blaming me for what happened. An even bigger problem is, she's not the only one in this situation. There are millions, literally, who can't keep up with life and are just ping-ponging between jobs, complaining about low wages.
I'm not going to penalize the grocery shop for this, although I should, for keeping incompetent people on the job, but I'm going to penalize her for sure. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know how to execute a simple task like this, even without experience.
In a sense I'm glad we get a lot of the shopping part automated and we also have online shopping, that not only saves us from dealing with incompetent people (to some extent), but also saves us time. It is true, many are going to lose their jobs over time as AI takes over, but this is a process you can't stop as it's happening.