The other problems and solutions:
Shops are populated by zombies that shuffle along without any awareness of what is going on around them until they find a place I want to be - then they stop. They walk past the automated tills, fail to take note of the three available ones near the exit then wait at the entrance next to the tills disabled because of lack of staff. All they have to do is walk past the dead tills and they would be able to see there is no need to wait. When the number of available tills exceeds the number of people ahead of me in the queue I walk past them. I would happily point out the available tills but they are too busy texting to notice.
The scanner and the bagging area scales are connected via a satellite internet connection so I scan, put the item in the bagging area then the scales wait for me to put the item in the bagging area. At some point the scanner section will time out and let me scan other item which I can get to the bagging area before the timeout messages has gone to GEO and back. The scale happily records the weight of the second item as the first and I can zip through the rest of my purchases without further delay because the two sides remain one item out of step... until some helpful assistant turned up one day to show me what I was doing wrong and prevented me from putting each item in the bagging area until the scales were ready for them.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
