Stocking the cigarette shelves

Wednesday, December 3rd, 2008

If you are not a smoker, then you won't give a damn.

We can buy cigarettes in many places - the corner shop, the newsagents and there you get served one by one if there is a queue for the counter. Our supermarkets are different for they have dedicated booths or kiosk for the sale of cigarettes and tobacco and often as not some candy.

You'd think a dedicated booth would be great but so often, it is piss poor. There is usally one lass serving the customers who can form a considerable queue. Behind her there is often another girl for whom customer service is something she expects to receive but not to give. She is busily replenishing the stock on the shelves and is oblivious to the queue. She has loftier objectives than you.

There may be 4 full columns of Lambert & Butler ciggies there already and no sign of a rush on that brand. But the 5th column is not quite full so she busies herself with filling it to bursting. Same goes for each and every other brand. As far as she is concerned, customers can fart or recite the Koran and it won't make a blind bit of difference.

Stood at one such booth yesterday - no queue, just on my own not that it made any bloody difference. The stacker carried on regardless, the server was attending to some scraps of paper - another Government leak perhaps or an encoded email from MI5 warning that Al Qaeda were coming to nick the cigarettes?

'Am I invisible?' I asked loudly. The server girl looked up and said, 'No, I am just doing this,' without explaining. The replenisher must have been stone deaf for all she noticed.

Well, I did get served eventually and I asked what the other girl was doing. 'Stocking the shelves,' was the unsurpising answer. 'Could she not have stopped and served me?' I asked. I might just have asked the question in Armenian for I got no response.

You may well blame the tosser who trained them but they are not all like that. At my nearby Tesco's ciggie booth, there is a big lad who is about as effeminate as any man can be without actually being a woman and having breasts. He is fast and attentive and always pleasant. Maybe, he should be a trainer.