Getting yelled at in the grocery store… 5. April 2016

 Coffee and slightly toasted rye bread

 Spinach pelmeni

 Mushroom curry with rice and some cucumber

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So I had a terrible experience at the local grocery store that left me rather upset and angry for most of the day. When I was at the till and the cashier was ringing up my groceries, she picked up my onions that were packaged in a net with pretty small holes and wanted to put that into a plastic bag. I stopped her by saying: “Don’t put anything in a plastic bag please!” to which she got visibly angry at and started ranting that she needs to put dirty things in a bag to keep the conveyor belt clean. I said I didn’t think the onion skins were neither crumbling nor really falling out of the net and repeated my request not to put them into a plastic bag. She still did so while I was typing in my pin code to pay for my stuff and kept on raving that she needed to keep the conveyor belt clean and that SHE had to clean up the mess afterwards and she didn’t want to do it.

I was getting pretty angry at this point, because the cashier was almost yelling at me throughout the transaction, so I snapped back that the plastic bag was completely unnecessary in this case and asked her if their own store wasn’t in fact supporting the big campaign against the usage of plastic bags? I took my onions out of the plastic bag and tried to give it back to the cashier, because the bag was still clean and could be used again, but she wouldn’t take it. At that point an old lady, who was next in queue, started berating me, telling me that I was a terrible selfish person causing a scene… and it was just awful- two strangers almost yelling at me for doing absolutely nothing wrong.

Since I refused to throw the plastic bag away, the cashier did it herself in a huffy and dramatic manner whilst still going off at me for being a horrible person. I’m not good in such situations, I tried to remain calm and I think I managed to remain polite although I my tone probably became angry as well at some point, but mostly I felt shocked and on the verge of crying, because fuck… I was getting berated and yelled at for no real reason. I am usually not the kind of person to write complaints, but I ended up writing two: one on a piece of feedback slip in the store and since I didn’t know if those actually went anywhere I wrote another one to an online representative at home. I got an e-mail later with an apology that didn’t really make me feel any better and mostly because I asked them again about their involvement in the campaign against plastic bags and they blatantly ignored that topic altogether.

But really, what customer service! I know customer service in Estonia is generally pretty bad, so whenever I actually get GOOD customer service I am shocked over the fact. But that cashier lady sure took the bloody cake… No I don’t even want to know what she did to the poor young mother who came after the old angry hag and whose sauerkraut was leaking all over the conveyor belt.

I am not a super crazy environmentalist, but I am a firm believer that people should use less plastic bags and I for sure try to not use them whenever I can. And these bloody onions did not a damn plastic bag on them.