Male Bashing

When I go to the grocery store I always look for a female checker. Even if the male checker has a shorter line I almost always go to the woman. I’ll only go to the guy if there is no one in his line, I only have a few items and the customer ahead of me in the woman’s line is a man (male customers are just as bad as male checkers – run away. And a male customer in a male checkers line…egads!).

Women checkers are just better, because women know how to multitask. A woman checker can zip your items through with both hands moving quickly in a steady rhythm while at the same time sorting things out that need to be bagged separately. (Because the bagger is usually a clueless high school boy who WILL put your bread at the bottom of a bag of cans.) All the while noticing your lasagna noodles and giving you her special recipe for vegetarian lasagna, and still stopping to notice that you’ve purchased two bags of Pepperidge Farm cookies and did you know that you were entitled to a third bag free. She sends the bag boy off for your third bag while placing your tomatoes on the scale and bagging some of the smaller stuff herself, being careful to bag the cleaning supplies separately from the food. Then keying in the weight of the bagged tomatoes and placing the oranges on the scale, while continuing to bag and NEVER missing a beat on the recipe she’s giving you complete with precise ingredient measurements. Then when I ask if the grape juice rang up at the sale price she continues to zip things through with her left hand while her right hand scrolls through the receipt to see about the price of the juice and answering my question and still expounding on that recipe.

Doing my part to keep things moving I’ve scanned my store card through the reader and then my debit card so that she and I will complete my transaction at the same time (male customers wait until everything has been rung up before they even begin LOOKING for their store card or money.) and 5 full minutes ahead of the guy checker next to us whose merchandise ringing came to a screeching halt when the customer asked if her toothpaste was on sale.

If I’d gone to him I’d have been out of there 10 minutes later, sans extra free bag of cookies, still not knowing if my juice had been on sale and without a delightful recipe for vegetarian lasagna.

And don’t even get me started on the stock help which is almost always male. You ask a guy, who happens to be stocking an aisle near you, where the raisins are and he’ll lead you around a half dozen aisles and then proudly say ‘here they are’. Heck I could have done that, thanks. But ask a woman and she’ll say ‘Aisle 12, ‘bout three quarters of the way down on your left as you face the front of the store, second shelf from the top’.

And on that note I share the following from this mornings comics. It's small on this page but if you click on it it'll open in a separate page bigger.