[afraidfortherepublic]

'O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!' Robert Burns

[Slings and Arrows]

I’ll not haggis with you over that.

[Vigilanteman]

I loved the remarks about the supermarket checkout lines. Yeah, our lines are painfully slow compared to theirs. There are several reasons for that and these are just a few:

1. Concept of customer service. Even during the slow times of the day, cashiers will appear out of nowhere and open lines if people stack up more than three deep. Here, you can go to a Wal-Mart with 22 checkout line and four or five of them might be open.
   
2. Educational level of the cashiers. In Japan, there are two ways to pay: cash or card. Every Japanese cashier can make change and seldom, if ever, has to flail about borrowing changes from other cashiers or calling managers to do price checks and the like.
   
3. Coupons are nearly unknown and checks are a novelty that only businesses use rarely to pay each other or make refunds to customers whom they don't care to keep.
   
4. Customers. In addition to not having nimrods who will fumble for a pen-- or borrow one-- and START writing a check only after the sale is wrung up, they don't have an army of EBT card users who will argue with the cashiers because they aren't allowed to pay for their smokes or pet food or whatever on their special government cards. In fact, most of the customers will have their card or their cash out (often with the odd change) as soon as the total is rung up.
   
5. Baggers work in tandem with cashiers, like a choreographed soloist and pianist. On those rare occasions where help is scare or business is slow and the cashier is working solo, the customer pitches in and helps bag, wrap or tie their own purchases. Customers often bring their own canvas bags or wrap (furoshiki) and at Dai-Ei (closed equivalent Japan has to Wal-Mart) and other low-margin, high volume stores, they will even go a step further and stamp a card for people who don't require bags. Each stamp is worth about a nickle and a full stamp card is worth a dollar or two and treated like cash on a purchase.
   
6. Supplied grocery bags are substantial. Even if it is filled with canned goods or one of those monster bottles of tempura oil, the bags hold. There is no need for double bagging and no danger of stuff falling right through the flimsy crap our retailers supply here in the USA. A substantial portion of your customers are going to carry them home or on a bicycle as opposed to loading them in a car.