Just say what you mean

A woman and her daughter came through my line over the weekend and right from the start she was mean and nasty. But it was the beginning of my shift and since I had just gotten there I was pretty patient with her. As I was scanning her order there were two items at the end that she pulled aside and said, "These are separate." So I said, "Ok.", and continued scanning her order. I rang her up and gave her the total. She slide her credit card through and paid. Then as I was putting some of her groceries in a bag she huffed and said impatiently, "Well you didn't ring up these other two items with the rest of my order." Now normally, I don't outright contradict customers and I would have just let it go and apologized for not ringing up the whole order together but now this woman was really starting to piss me off so I decided to speak up. I told her (as calmly as I could and trying to be polite) "I didn't ring them up yet because I thought you said you wanted that to be a separate order." "I wanted it to be bagged separately, not a separate order!" she snapped at me. She then huffed and said, "Well now I have to find my card again." and she made a big show of digging through her entire purse before finally pulling out her wallet out and getting her card. I would also like to point out that she had just had her card out literally 5 seconds earlier so it could not have been that hard to find.

Now I have tried to be empathetic to the customer's point of view here--it might have been mildly annoying to have to get her card out again but in the grand scheme of things it is not that big of a deal. It was only an extra 2 items. It took less then a minute to scan and bag them. But the point that I would really like to make is that the whole situation was really easily avoided if she had just clearly stated what she wanted in the first place. All she had to do was say what she meant. All she had to say was, "I would like these bagged separately, please." These 7 little words would have solved the whole problem! Or just say, "Please bag these separately." I guess that was too difficult for her to do so she just expected me to psychically know what she meant when she said, "These are separate." Which is as ambiguous as Ryan Seacrest's sexuality. And if she hadn't been so nasty I might have asked her ahead of time what she meant but I just didn't feel like dealing with her. And she seemed to be in a rush but she was wasting her own time--not mine--I had to be there either way.