also not completely clear on the concept

[waider]

Very chatty checkout lady at the supermarket. Chatting so much to the woman in front of me that she absent-mindedly lifted up the "Next Customer Please" thingy¹ and started adding my groceries to the other customer's. Then there was a problem with the credit card swipe, so she had to key in the card number by hand, during which she uttered the following gem:

...these are really difficult to type in, you have to get all the numbers exactly right, not like those barcodes...

Er, yes. Quite. Just scan my stuff already, eh?

1. Dunno what you call these things. It's a little plastic doohickey that you put on the checkout conveyer to separate your stuff from the next/previous custmer.

Comments

[littleamerica.livejournal.com]

Dunno what you call these things. It's a little plastic doohickey that you put on the checkout conveyer to separate your stuff from the next/previous customer.

"Grocery divider" gets more hits than "grocery separator" by a long shot, but it is evidently un-named [1].

[nerdsholmferret.livejournal.com]

It calls for something German, I think. In this case, perhaps it was a "blunderbar".

Why German, Israel is a country too?

[waidesworld.livejournal.com]

Why not the schnetzel splitter?

Re: Why German, Israel is a country too?

[(Anonymous)]

Allow a german to fill you in on this: Even we, the masters of the germanic language, who seem to have words for things you didn't even know existed in the first place, wouldn't know how to address that ... err ... thingy. I expect supermarkets will have to do without them eventually, because, well, suppose you ran out of those, how would you order more?