Right need your opinions on this one folks, would you have did the same thing as me?
Now just as a bit of background I've been told by the Team Leaders that I'm doing very well at Sainsbury's and I am one of their key members. I work in basically a glorified Local. Not quite big enough to be a proper supermarket yet not quite small enough to be considered convenience. I basically run self-scans and supervise all 10 on a regular basis and would like to think that I know what I am doing and just keep the head down and get on with it.
Today I did an 8-12 as overtime and it was fairly quiet until half 11 as you'd expect. Everything was going fairly well and I was running the self-scan as normal. Then with about 20 minutes to go this woman with a suit and Sainsbury's name badge came down and started looking at all of us. I have no idea who she was but can only assume she was some Area Manager or something? You know the type. She is her job, business-driven etc etc.
I've never met her before and she immediately dismissed me as a lowly checkout member who hasn't a clue what they're doing. The tannoy came over saying all available colleagues to checkouts and we weren't even that busy to be honest. Everybody started stepping on each others toes saying do this do that when they don't actually work on tills.
She came up to me and stood quietly for a moment. Then she said all matter-of-factly: "We have a 59% target for customers going through self-scan and there are 3 at the machines yet several customers at the checkouts..."
I replied: "And the majority of them have trolleys." (Valid point)
Woman: "There are some baskets too."
Me: "And there are even more trolleys." (Valid point)
To be fair at this point I started taking the pee and wasn't really interested in her business nonsense. She came across as very arrogant and the type that tells everybody what to do but has never actually worked a shift on the shop floor. I have no time for people like that and proceeded to ignore her and just got on with my job as quite frankly she was distracting me from my work.
She told me to go and run the line and bring people down however the majority of our customers are the elderly so don't want to use self-scans. I asked a customer in front of this woman who said she wanted cashback - fair enough.
I went back to my position and said sarcastically: "No she wants cashback."
She then said go and do it again to which I replied: "Then there is nobody to supervise the self-scans so no." Which I believe is a very valid point as by this time they started filling up.
I just ignored her for the next 10 minutes, doing my job as normal until my shift was up. I walked past with a big smirk on my face just to annoy her.
This character, whoever she was, really irritated me today. She just appeared out of nowhere and all of a sudden staff were acting like trained monkeys, jumping at her every command. What would you have did in this situation?