On the other side...

I was out runnning errands the other day.  It got to be around 5:30 or 6:00 and I was on my way home but I figured on the way back home I would swing by the grocery store and pick up a few things for dinner.  As someone who has both worked at grocery stores and been a customer at grocery stores I can tell you that from around 5:00 until maybe 6:30 or 7:00 there is a pretty steady rush of people.  People on their home from work are picking up things for dinner or they are running in to get stuff for kids lunches for the next day or they have realized they are out of something at home and swing by the pick it up while they are out.  I'm sure most of you have experienced this first hand when you have driven past your local grocery store on the way home from work and thought "Oh, I'll just run in and grab a loaf of bread or I'll just grab some milk."  You run in for two things and get stuck waiting in line of 3 or 4 people. 

So I went in and grabbed my spaghetti and pasta sauce.  I was expecting it be busy (which is was) but what I was not expecting was that there would only be 2 registers open and 1 of them was the express lane.  That meant that for everyone shopping who had over 15 items there was only one register. 

First, let me tell you that this is just as frustrating for us as cashiers as it is for you as customers.  We don't like to look up and see tons of people waiting in line (some waiting patiently...others not so patiently).  So on this particular day I was a customer--standing in line with 2 items and wondering why there were only 2 registers open when practically everyday around this time there is a rush of customers.  It seems like poor customer service to me--when you know that it is going to be busy at a certain to not schedule enough people to work. 

It is the cusotmer service manager who generally does the scheduling for the front end and I will say in his defense that poor scheduling is not always the manager's fault.  Each department is given a certain number of hours for the week