Man Hopes To Become Faster Than Lidl Checkout Girl

14th Apr 2015

Efficiency-obsessed German grocery multiples are well known for their rapid scanning checkouts - deliberately providing only limited amounts of space for customers’ items to force shoppers to pack quickly often while the assistant piles items on top of each other.

Tommy Cornelius O’Donovan, 29, from Silversprings has been training for over a year in his garden shed with a mock-up of a Lidl checkout while his brother Finbarr acts as the steely employee -  flinging fragile items on to a narrow table while continually barking at Tommy to pack faster.

The pair hope to come up with a solution that leaves the employee feeling embarrassed at how slow they are.

“My dream is to be able to shout ‘come on boy, come on! You’re as slow as a Kerry toad’ at the checkout guy”.
 

Average Mary makes a crucial mistake by not being goal side of the checkout as the Lidl droid begins scanning her shopping. Mary now has an increased cardiac arrest rate of 52%.

After traversing the huge conveyor belt and being scanned, shoppers’ items are then piled up on a metal surface roughly the size the size of two beer mats. German supermarket big-wigs have designed their checkouts like this so that customers are more inclined to put their shopping directly into trolleys and pack it into bags elsewhere rather than holding up the queue.

If a customer is not packing fast enough shoppers will often be asked to pack at a nearby shelf rather than take up valuable profit-making time at the till – often provoking an adverse reaction. The supermarkets have found stiff resistance among many Corkonians to being told what to do and it is something that is the driving force behind the O’Donovan brother’s campaign.
 

"My campaign is in the best interests of the next generation", claims Tommy O'Donovan

“They might control our country’s finances and our chances of getting to Euro 2016 but we will not be forced into going to ‘ze shelf’ to pack our bags”, said a determined Tommy, “as far as I’m concerned this is as much about our sovereignty as it is about broken eggs and burst salad bags”.

Both brothers have been training several nights a week and claim to have made significant progress in decrypting the efficient systems used by German supermarkets. Reluctant to reveal their tactics and full plan they were still willing to provide their top tips to the PROC to help Corkonians channel their inner-contrarian into ‘defeating’ German efficiency…

TOMMY’S TOP TIPS
1. Scrape off some of the black lines on the bar code of one item and put it half way along the conveyor belt so that the checkout assistant has to punch the lengthy code in on the keypad instead. You could gain 10 to 15 seconds of valuable bag packing time here especially if you deliberately add further confusion to the situation by pretending you’ll go back to and pick up a replacement with a good barcode. This might cause them to panic and lose the run of themselves handing you an early psychological advantage.

2. Place your items on the conveyor belt in the same order you want to pack them and do some intimidating warm up exercises to freak out the checkout guy like quickly packing and unpacking a small bag repeatedly while you wait.  
 

If you don't hurry up this bitch will start throwing your shopping on the floor.

3. Have all your bags opened and ready for action the second the customer in front of you gets their receipt and don’t be afraid to elbow your way in front of them if his nibs has already started scanning your shopping.  

4. Always pay by card so that you can take advantage of the awkward pause while their machines contact The Man who owns the internet and the banks to see if Angela Merkel has left you enough in your wage packet to be able to pay her for your shopping. You should be able to pack an entire bag-for-life to the brim during this pause.

5. Being blessed to be Corkonian, use your inherent skills as a charmer and ‘banterist’ to distract the ‘scanning droid’ momentarily from his or her work - complimenting their corporate-compliant haircut or trying to convince them that they might be related to a particular clann of Harringtons from Castletownbere. By the time they’ve translated your friendly banter into their native tongue and realised you are saying things that are not helpful to their employer’s profits they’ll have wasted a good ten seconds and you’ll have cleared the deck.

Tommy is hoping to unveil his plan during the summer when supermarket staff least expect it. He predicts the entire German discount supermarket scene will implode. Dowtcha Tommy, boy.