Great Parking Karma, Bad Line Karma

According to my seven year old, I have great parking karma.

It’s true.

No matter how full a parking lot or side street, I always seem to find a great parking spot. This parking karma especially comes in handy when I need to travel to downtown Salt Lake where finding a decent parking spot can be difficult or expensive.

Sadly, my awesome parking karma is offset by bad line karma. Say I go to the store and nab the perfect parking spot. I can guarantee when I go to find a checkout line, I’ll get stuck in the line that’s not going anywhere.

For example, the other day at Wal-Mart I got spot as close as you can get to one of the entrances. I quickly picked up the few things that Marathon Girl needed and then headed for one of the express checkout lines. There were three options:

  • Line 1 had three people waiting. Two of the three people in line appeared to have carts with more than 15 items.
  • Line 2 had one person. The checkout clerk was about half way through his order.
  • Line 3 also had three people in it though everyone in that line seemed to be carrying everything they would be buying in their arms.

So which one did I choose? Line 2, of course. It seemed the obvious choice. As I got in line, I had visions of being out the door and to my car in two minutes or less.

Did it happen?

Not by a long shot.

By the time all the man’s groceries had been scanned and I was putting my few items on the counter, I noticed that the man had pulled out a bag of coins and started counting them. Yes, the man was paying his entire $28 bill in coins. A woman pushed her cart in behind me, saw the guy counting out coins, and did a one-eighty back to one of the other express lines.

I looked at the other lines and thought that this line was still the best option.

I was wrong.

The guy was actually pretty fast counting his money but the cashier was a woman in her 60s or 70s. She slowly counted out all of his money—twice.

In the meantime people sailed through the other express lanes. Once thing I failed to notice about Line 1 was that it had a young cashier who seemed to be determined to set some kind of checkout record with every customer.

And me?

I spent the next 5 minutes watching people count coins over and over again.

At least I had a short walk to my car.