Just the other day I was at Costco enjoying a tasty piece of pizza. As I was sitting there facing the exit, a rather lengthy line started to build up of people waiting for the grocery warden to check their respective receipts.
Everyone knows the drill
Having a background in Psychology, situations like these make it difficult not to observe and analyze the reactions of people.
The line was about six or seven carts deep with mostly full carts; however the person in the back I noticed only had a couple of items. Going by the vascular dilation of his facial arteries and varying hues of pulsating red it seemed like he was painfully aware of this fact… that somehow, because of his limited cargo he was entitled to a shorter wait time.
Cart rage
At our Costco smiley faces are always drawn on the receipts of customers who bring their kids. I’m just guessing that somewhere in their training program employee’s watch a video or something that tells them they have to do it no matter how long the line gets. This occasion was no exception to the smiley face rule. What happened next was a good example of a growing epidemic, “Cart Rage”.
All of a sudden he exploded out of the line like a bullet leaving the barrel of a gun, in a mad dash toward the exit. He almost escaped before the receipt warden called his way, “Sir, I need to see your receipt please”. To which he reluctantly showed and snatched back after the mark was made. He was visibly upset that he had to wait for such nonsense.
The blinker
Beware of cart rage! Often people with similar temperaments are easy to upset when going in and out of grocery aisles. Because carts do not come equipped with blinkers and we are not (currently) obligated to use hand signals, it does make it tough to let people know where you are going. One time I was turning around an aisle and just so happened to pull in front of a lady who apparently had a cart rage predisposition. By the look on her face you would’ve thought I talked about her mom in a derogatory fashion or that she smelled something foul and offensive.
Solutions
I would not be opposed to a complete revamp of grocery cart technology. Blinkers, break lights, emergency flashers, the backup beep, or even a bicycle horn would be a great improvement. Creating such a cart might eliminate or at least dramatically reduce the tragedy that cart rage has caused in our community.
Production of these carts would be a great way to stimulate the economy and give much needed jobs to those who are on the tail end of unemployment benefits. Other possible solutions to reduce cart rage could be a more strict enforcement of the 20 items or less checkout rule, smarter self service machines, realistic staffing: employee to customer ratio, vanilla bean plug-ins, and proper cart maintenance when carts veer to one side, shake, or otherwise malfunction.
I realize these are all short-term fixes and what needs to happen before cart-reform is self-reform. People with cart rage need to get the help they need before it consumes their lives. Life can get frustrating I know and for those who lack coping skills the last thing that they need to do is get behind a cart in the wrong frame of mind. Let us work together on providing a way out of what has become an epidemic in our shopping stores.
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