The Produce Politeness Rule To Keep In Mind While Checking Out

There was a time when checking out at the grocery store was simply a matter of piling everything on the conveyor belt and grabbing the bags to go at the other end. These days, however, in an age of self checkouts, reusable bags, and ever-changing food trends, you have be on your toes when you hit the cash register. Have your coupons ready, your debit card out, and hit the line running because life moves quickly at the grocery store. You definitely don't want to be "that person" when you get through a busy line and hold everyone else up.

If grocery store etiquette is important to you, you probably already do a lot of things to help out your cashier and baggers, like grouping cold items together so they can get bagged together, placing alcoholic drinks at the end of the order so that the cashier doesn't have to stop in the middle and enter your ID information, and placing the divider between your pile of products and the next person in line so the orders don't get confused. You might be surprised to know that there's one thing you could be doing that you think is helpful, but is actually pretty aggravating to your cashier: Telling them what each piece of produce is without being asked.

Blame it on the self checkout experience. If you use them often enough, self checkouts can give you a sense of over confidence when it's time to pay for groceries, and it's not unusual to start feeling like a bit of an expert when you're keying in all different types of produce. There's a big difference between the self checkout register and the registers with actual cashiers, however. Self checkouts are designed to walk customers through the process with as little of an understanding of using a register as possible, using photos and touch screen prompts to zero in on the right product.

A cashier has a completely different register that's equipped with a scanner and a keyboard. This is because cashiers are trained to know a ton of different items in the store, and they see them over and over again. What they're looking for when they're turning over your heirloom tomatoes to find the sticker is not the name of the item but either the bar code or product code (which to the register are the same thing). In fact, when you tap on the photo of your heirloom tomato at the self checkout, it's just a prompt for the computer to find the right product code.

Unless you've worked at a grocery store before, you might not realize that cashiers are not assigned to the single task of standing behind a register. In fact grocery store staff do a little bit of everything, often coming in before the store opens or staying after it closes to stock the shelves, so they have a lot of product knowledge. Mackenzie Filson, a former Trader Joe's employee, explained for EatingWell, "We were likely the person who stocked that exact papaya at 5 a.m., and we know the difference between how Honeycrisp and Jonagold apples feel with frightening accuracy."

The only time that you need to tell a cashier what's in a bag of loose mushrooms or potatoes is when they actually ask. It takes some time for new cashiers to get up to speed on the myriad of items in the store, plus there are times when an apple is missing a sticker and they just want to double check to be sure the right item is getting entered. In that case it's important to remember if you grabbed the Yukon Golds or the fingerlings.

Unless you're asked, however, don't sweat the details — a trained cashier scans thousands of items a day. If they don't know the code for an item offhand, they have ways to look up the numbers super quickly. While the checkout line is a hectic place and nobody wants to waste time, your cashier knows what they're doing.