Closing Time

"Attention shoppers, the time is now 8:30, and Stop&Shop will be closing in half an hour. Please plan your shopping accordingly, and bring all items to the front of the store. As always hank you for shopping at Stop&Shop."

Ah, the closing page. Whenever I close the store,I always start the closing pages at half past the hour before we close. I then make one a quarter of, ten of, five of, and finally the closing closing page. While great for traffic flow and ridding the store of the people that pay our bills, there is always one or more straggler that over stays their welcome. Introducing the straggler. They linger, looking at multiple products, and ensure that employees do not get out of work at a decent time. There's no real way to get rid of them. Whenever we have stragglers in the store, I always approach them, "Is there anything I can help you find?..." In an overly friendly manner. "No? Oh, ok, well, we're closing in X number of minutes." Sometimes we have people still in the store even after it's supposed to be closed. Those are the one's that usually ask, "Oh, you close at 9? I thought you were 24hours" and act all surprised.

"No, no we don't close at 9, I've just been making pages for the past half hour, just to hear myself speak." While I know I can't actually say such a thing, I just keep it in my head.

It often makes me wonder how those "lovely customers" would react if someone was to stay behind wherever they worked. It's more of an annoyance than a big deal. Most employees want to get as far away from where they work as fast as possible as soon as the store is closed.

Since we can no longer try and control "traffic flow", by locking on side of the store an hour before we close, it makes it far more difficult to keep tabs on how many people are left in the store. When people ask why one side of the store is locked, I simply tell them, "Oh, we have to lock this side up early for security reasons." They usually buy it,but it's the same people every single time, that try coming in on the side we lock up.

It's an unavoidable thing, but I felt the need to share.