Buy it, or don't buy it already

Cold food needs to stay in the refrigerator or freezer. It's pretty simple -- even my son figured it out after he got food poisoning from drinking left-out apple juice. But we dumped a half a cart load of meat, frozen and other perishables last night. A couple had a "form of payment problem" (read that "the card was declined"), and instead of coming back 20 minutes later, they returned 2 hours later, and still couldn't pay.

OK, where are the brains? Customers, cashiers, CSM's? After they didn't return in 20 minutes, wouldn't you have found somebody to sort the food, pull the perishables and at least put them in a cooler? But no, two carts of unsorted food sitting out for 2 hours. It wouldn't have been safe to sell to them at that point, anyway.

So I sorted -- perishable, now perished food in one cart, non-perishables in the other cart. Perishables to claim out and destroy, non-perishables to restock. I left the perishables for another cashier to tag, and left with the full cart of non-perishables to restock all over grocery. Break. 2 1/2 hours of doing nothing that I expected to do.

Now, rest of the night I ended up doing returns -- clearing out things that people returned, decided they didn't want when they came to the checkout, or left lying around the store. Department staff are supposed to come up and get it, but everyone is short-handed. So we take it to their department if their bins are overflowing. Here -- restock this! Unfortunately, most of them are waiting for us with another cart of mislaid stuff that guests have left all over their department. So it's an endless circle of delivery and pickup, ala FedEx. Big difference, if I worked at FedEx, my paycheck would be better!