sounds like someone had a bad trip to the supermarket, similar to mine

Gee, whatever gave you that idea?

Oooh! I agree!! I'd vote for that. Could we extend it slightly to include people who found items that had no price anywhere nearby but just thought they'd chuck it in the cart and see how much it cost at the checkout before deciding if they wanted it or not? I seem to always end up behind those people.

Maybe a tobacco kiosk, located somewhere in the checkout lobby, after the registers ..... catering to tobacco products only, and the only spot in the store to purchase said products .....

Beth, you must be lucky. I don't think I've ever encountered that before. Now, I have gotten behind people who bought a whole cartload of stuff they thought was on sale, and when they found out it wasn't, they didn't want it. But, that actually turned out to be the store's fault.

Jeff, that's not a bad solution, other than finding the space to implement it.

You should try the self-checkouts at Albertsons, where after you scan each item a clerk has to come over and push a button.

It would be more efficient to wait behind a tobacco buyer, I promise.

It's obvious you're an H.E.Butt shopper. [did you know that's what HEB stands for. Owned by the Butt family, a bit of trivia. I went to college with Howard E. Butt Jr. he did the name proud.l]

But HEB should put tobacco in a stand in the beer/wine dept. Everyone knows that smokers are drinkers.

My current pet hate is those people who stand in the print it yourself photo booths for hours flicking through all 75 pictures (several times) on their camera before having to start again before printing. I was waiting ten minutes on a day I was in a rush!

Rach, a good solution to your problem is your own photo printer at home ..... they don't take up much space, and they now print top-quality images on photo paper ..... the images you select, as many or as few copies as you need ..... and the price has come down some since they were introduced .....

Janie, that whole self-checkout theory has a way to go before becoming efficient. Wal-Mart seems to be getting close to making it work, but you still need cashier intervention if you want to pay by check.

Wallace, I knew about H.E. Butt before I knew about HEB grocery stores. There's a camp in the Hill Country named after him.

Rachel, it's puzzling why some people don't seem to even try to get organized before tackling a task like that...if only to save their own time, even if they don't care about inconveniencing others.

Jeff, depending on how often you print photos, owning a photo-quality printer can still be more expensive per print than going to Wal-Mart or a similar place. I've actually thrown away two otherwise perfectly good inkjet printers because we didn't use them enough to keep the heads from becoming clogged beyond repair.

Along the lines of what Jeff and Wallace suggest, I think alcohol and tobacco products should be sold at the kiosk, not necessarily because the two go together, but because none of the checkers are ever old enough to sell alcohol and then I end up in line behind a string of people purchasing alcohol who have to wait for adult intervention to complete their transactions.

You all are a bunch of whiners! Haven't you ever read the book'101 Things to do while waiting in the check-out line'. Really!

Heh. Let me guess. #1 on that list is "read a copy of 101 Things To Do While Waiting in the Checkout Line." Right?

#2 is "read War and Peace. In Russian. Which you learned while waiting in the checkout line."

As the primary grocery-shopper in our household, I absolutely feel your pain at the checkout counter, Eric.

But then again, being the spouse of a recent former smoker, I can attest to just how much those folks truly are treated like second-class citizens.

(Dede kicked the habit 1 year, 4 months, & 16 days ago - but I'm not counting, no. Yippee!!)

There's no way that beer drinkers would tolerate being treated with the same disdain as smokers, yet I believe Coors to be just about as "evil" as Marlboro. Consider this: There's no "Mothers Against Smoking Drivers" protest group...