I was at the pharmacy recently picking up a prescription, and noticed a sign taped to the counter asking customers to please refrain from using their cell phones while paying for their medicines. The sign got me thinking about cell phone etiquette—or, too often it seems, the lack thereof.
One of my personal pet peeves is when a person either starts or continues a cell phone conversation while going through the check-out at a store. Not only does this potentially slow things down for other people in line (since research has shown that multitasking when talking on the phone is not very efficient), but it also must be awfully frustrating for the cashier who may have to verbally convey information to a distracted or inattentive customer.
So, I was pleased to see that my pharmacy was confronting people with the fact that it expects customers to pay full attention to the task of making their purchases. But, the more I thought about it, I found myself growing sad that it had come to this—a store having to say, in effect, “We insist that you be polite.” Whatever happened to good, old-fashioned manners?
If you Google the term “cell phone etiquette,” you’ll get thousands upon thousands of results (I performed the search just this morning and got 4,510,000 hits.) Clearly, I’m not the only person who thinks that people tend to behave in very impolite ways too often when using their cell phones.