#124 Grocery Store Checkout Belt Triangles

Earlier in my adulthood I was a cashier / service clerk at a major chain grocery store. I'm quite certain a number of ergonomic advances have been put into place even before I started working in the industry, but one that has been showing up more and more are these triangles at the end of the belt nearest to the cashier.

When I was in this business, we didn't have these triangles. But I get it: the purpose is for the cashier to be as ergonomic as possible and have to do the least amount of strain on their joints. This triangle is meant to be an assist. In theory, the triangle will push the items on the belt closer to the cashier so they don't have to strain to push/slide it across the scanner and into a bag or down another belt. Although, during a normal 8-hour work day I would *maybe* get one item that I couldn't see in that little corner where the triangles are now located, but I feel like it happened less frequently than that, even. Is it worth the effort? I'm not convinced.

Every time I see these triangles in action, more often than not they're just squishing a loaf of bread or a bag of chips or some other grocery item. The photo taken for this blog entry was actually taken by me on a recent trip to the chain store I used to work for. If you notice, I have slid all of my groceries to the far side of the belt so that nothing will get caught in the triangle. In fact, the cases of soda are so wide (long?) that they will actually get caught on the triangle and push the rest of the groceries back. This occurs because there is an optical sensor just below the employee's right hand (in this photo) which senses that there are objects on the belt and the belt should stop automatically moving. In addition, after taking this photo, I immediately moved my bag of lunchmeat so it would not get caught by the triangle. Good thing I was paying attention!

Now, if everyone thought like me, everyone would also push all of their items to the side of belt closest to the cashier. (In fact, they would also probably group all of their groceries together how they wish them to be packed, but that's a totally different blog entry, possibly forthcoming.) But not everyone thinks like me. Not everyone is intelligent, either. A lot of people go through most of their day on auto-pilot, much like these cashiers, probably. They don't care if your groceries get smashed, they're just trying to get through their day and avoid having to deal with rude or bitchy customers.