Turning it up to 21

A few days back, Retail Retell was talking about how Krogers in his area seemed to be inflating their aisle counts during remodels. QFC around here seems to be doing a similar thing, but this time with checkouts. While it is signed as if there are 21 checkouts in total, there are actually only 4 regular lines, with a further 2 mystery non-express lanes that are really just the cash registers at customer service, and the remainder made up of self checkouts. That's right, less than a fifth of the numbered registers are things I would expect to have numbers! I was quite surprised to see this, as Fred Meyer and QFC have been quite consistent in not numbering self checkouts in the past, but I suspect someone thought it would look bad for their self-described flagship store to only have four checkouts! In the background, the store's large bar can be seen -- we'll come back to that later.