Yesterday's grocery run was interesting

It's been raining a lot lately, though the rain was the most heavy yesterday. Despite that me, my dad, and my brother went grocery shopping.

Everything was going normally, until we were nearly done getting cold foods. The power went off for a few seconds before coming back on. A bit after that, we went in line to checkout but uh...

The store's system had gone down.

We waited a while, and a SINGLE register had began to work, but would only accept cash. Since my brother was the only one who had money (which would not be enough to cover the cost) by dad went to the line forming at the ATM (which did work). During that time, the one checkout lane had stopped working.

Once my dad came back with the money, we ended up waiting for a little while before one of the employees told all of us waiting that some of the self checkouts were working. There were two different clusters of self checkouts, one on each side of the normal checkout lanes. We ended up going to the one closest to the door we had originally entered. The employees over there said the checkouts weren't working, HOWEVER, one of them managed to get one running as a normal checkout lane, and so, the line began to slowly move along.

A 2nd self checkout was operational as a normal checkout a bit after. However, all of us would come to find out that only about half the items would ring up properly, so the employees asked the customers how much certain items cost so they could manually input prices. It took a while, but my family's cart was finally beginning to get items scanned.

When scanning, most of the stuff that didn't ring up had to have their prices guessed, so, the employees made jokes about The Price is Right as they just threw in numbers they felt were right. Some items may have gone a little over, and some definitely were cheaper (my dad said we basically got dog treats for $12 less than usual, and some bottled tea I grabbed I was unsure if they were part of the 70¢ clearance or not). After a while, all our stuff had been rung-up, we paid, and went home. Some of our cold foods had thawed a bit, so, if everything made it safely is yet to be fully known.

Also, during the wait, one of the employees was pushing a shipping cart with a few tubs of discount cookies they had opened and was handing out free cookies to the people waiting.

It was easy to see that the employees were getting frustrated, but they kept their cool and cracked some jokes to ease the tension. I really hope the rest of that day went smoothly and they were able to get their systems back up.

Also I think everyone working at that time should get a bonus in their paycheck. Definitely not an easy situation to deal with.