Tienda Inglesa

More adventures in language incompetency

There’s a grocery store attached to the shopping mall that’s attached to the Montevideo Hilton. It’s nice, like Kowalski’s and Costco made a baby. In the liquor section I picked out a Uruguayan wine, a Pisano Tannat ‘21 that I understand from my sampling here in Uruguay should be something I’ll enjoy (particularly for the price: ~$15 US). I also thought to grab a cork puller and a Mix Frutal Seleccion for snacking.

After wandering the aisles to look around, I was ready to check out. Usually, I skip the self-serve scanners in grocery stores, but the opportunity to try another new thing today without having to attempt talking in Spanish was appealing in the moment. I scanned the wine bottle first and there was a reassuring beep, so I scanned the cork puller, and the alarms went off. Loud blaring bleep-bleep-bleeps and the light atop the kiosk’s flagpole flipped from reassuring solid green to obnoxious strobing red.

A tall woman in a blue vest appeared, talking fast at me and pointing at the screen. She wasn’t asking, just informing me of something apparently obvious. I guessed the wine was the problem—they needed to verify my age, maybe I wasn’t supposed to try to scan it? She had that lanyard with the key that solves all problems at grocery kiosks, and she jammed it into the kiosk. Still talking at me, she twisted the key, and the alarms went quiet, the strobe quit flashing. The screen returned to its home screen image, and the woman stopped talking. She jabbed her finger at the screen once more, apparently for emphasis, then spun away.

I considered gathering my items, taking them to a regular checkout lane where a cashier could check my ID for the liquor purchase. Nah. The woman had not indicted that I should surrender. She had indicated that even I should be able to figure this out.

I scanned one of the snack containers. There was a loud beep, but no alarms. The screen didn’t appear to confirm a successful item scan. There was a question on the screen that I could not fluently comprehend. ¿Acumulas something. I resorted to using the camera option on my phone’s translator app:

Far below the pin pad with the blinking cursor was a small gray button:

No, Gracias

I clicked the No, Gracias button. But I do feel that I accumulated some points.