They're Everywhere!

I guess I can add this minor incident to the list:

I was in the "1 - 8 Items" line at the grocery store this morning, with my loaf of bread and my box of cereal, and about 3 spots ahead of me was a guy with his wife, son and grocery cart. I watched him unload his 12 items onto the conveyor belt and thought, "Well, that's a little rude. I guess he's reading the sign as 1 to whatever number of Items I have." And none of the stuff he was buying was repeated, meaning that I'm not counting 3 jars of peanut butter as 3 items or anything like that. So this was mildly annoying - because clearly it was more important that he get in the fast lane and slow it down with his over-the-limit number of groceries than it was that he go in the longer line that was actually designated for his profile of shopper - but whatever. I imagine that sort of thing happens every hour of every day in every Express Lane, in the grocery store world.

But then, as the cashier finished ringing up his 12 items (in the 1 - 8 Items line) and handed him the receipt (he was going to pay by credit card, typically the slowest form of payment... of course), he presented her with a coupon for one of his purchases! So of course she had to get on the phone, and get help, because she only knew how to ring through a coupon before the receipt was printed (something to do with how the tax gets calculated). So the six or seven of us now lined up behind him, all with our 8 items or less, stood and waited for a minute until a senior cashier arrived, at which point they had to rummage through the 4 bags that he'd already loaded into his cart, find the item, void it, and then ring it through again, this time with the coupon included (all to save what sounded like about 40 cents).

So by the time he was done - in the wrong line, because he considered his time to be more important than anyone else's - he'd delayed the rest of us about the equivalent of someone who had 30 - 40 items. At no point did he utter even a single syllable of apology or regret, instead acting like the cashier should have known he had a discount coupon despite not showing it until after she handed him the bill!

How do people get raised so poorly as to behave that way? (He was East Indian, by appearance, but I don't expect that had anything to do with anything.) How do they grow up into adults who believe that rules are for other people, even when violating those rules clearly causes an impact to those same other people? What the Hell kind of value system does that moron and his wife - equally unashamed of all that was going down - hold dear?