Well, that place sure ain’t fucking Costco, that’s for damned sure.
We need to also test your ability to spend money. I swear people at self checkout act like they have never used a credit/debit card in there life.
But also at regular checkouts.
You’ve just stood there motionless for the last 4 minutes, while someone else (potentially two people) scanned and bagged your purchases for you.
How is it that JUST NOW is the time you’ve decided is right to rummage through your bag for your wallet/purse, or check your banking app on your phone to see if the account actually has money in it? What were you doing for the rest of the time that was so vitally important?
I swear you can just about hear the birds flying around in their head sometimes.
There’s one bird in their head that’s half alive just bouncing around like the DVD logo.
I was doing my chess puzzles
I worked in grocery stores when I was younger, not going to give away my age, but I will tell you that people wrote a lot more checks then.
The number of times I would get to the end of the transaction and tell somebody the total and they would slowly pull the checkbook out of their purse or pocket, then other questions, do you have a pen?,what’s today’s date?, Oops I wrote it out to the wrong store, I need to start over.
I used to work at this kiosk which was inside a café. A customer wanted to pay from the inside, which can happen, but it’s rare. Since the reader was cable wired to the plug at the window, I had to bring it to where he was standing, but the cable wasn’t long enough. I pulled it out as much as I could, and waited for him to step forward and reach out with his card in his hand.
He was just standing there, waving his card at the machine from ~3-4 feet away. Like, I don’t know, at one point the card reader would go “HEY, that card is Larry! Hi, Larry, how are you doing, you old sonofabitch?”
I mean it’s one banana, Michael.
How much could it cost?
$10?
i worked at a grocery store for a few years, you want to go after 7pm and all your wishes will come true
Going early and going late often helps a lot with avoiding people who meander around blocking movement through the store.
Unfortunately, where I live is pretty heavily populated so the shelves are also a lot more empty if I go late or go too early.
make sure to speak to the manager or other person in charge when you find empty shelves
that will usually get some attention on it, the bread and dairy isles get beat up the most because they are usually only worked once a day unless someone complains (from my experience). The bread isle was my space when I moved on and it was almost impossible to keep filled because a bunch was vendor controlled but I always had store brand or generic stuff to fill the empty spaces before I’d leave for the day
someone was supposed to face it a few times a day but rarely did that happen unless the manager noticed or someone complained
polite customer complaints are powerful motivation in my experience
I love to go as early as possible. There are only old people around me and everything is calm and chill.
God forbid you need to check out (only one checkout lane open bc it’s so early) right behind one of those old people as they take about 65 centuries to pull exact change out of their asses
The other day I went shopping with my parents and my mother proceeded to pull out a whole lot of coupons. Clearly they are not long for this world.
Although I will give her credit, they were all actually in date
lol. But in all seriousness I don’t mean any disrespect just venting my frustrations as it seems time slows to a halt when checking out. So even if it only takes them a couple minutes to get their shit together it feels like 30 minutes.
Good thing many stores in Germany have self-Service checkouts. Easy and quick!
They’re very common in the U.S., too, in the past six years.
At first, I was against them, because of fewer people being employed, and I’d be “working for free”, but the much shorter wait convinced me. Also, Walmart employs a bunch of people to do the pick-up shopping, so, I think the number of people employed has stayed the same. Although, I suspect they pay the pickers less.
I refuse to use the pick-up shopping because half of my shopping is fresh vegetables, and I don’t trust anyone else to choose them for me. Yeah, I want two onions, but I want big ones, and ones with no mold or bruises. Food is expensive, and I don’t want to pay for poor quality. Yeah, I want a bunch of celery, but if the organic looks better than the normal, I might pay a bit extra for that this time. Paid pickers can’t make those choices for me.
Split queues for casual groceries and ranked competitive groceries
We really need self-service machine sections for those who are familiar with them and a beginner zone
Speedrun ALDI Any%
TempoTom: Tesco Speedrun https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqxtqKzoINmKbhFoBzcAfDVQah7OuvYMO
This was excellent. Disappointed the YT algorithm doesn’t agree
May I suggest a cart licence.
No license…you get a fucken carry bag, get your shit together!
Oh god yes. Get it away from my car. Why are you steering it with your elbows? Whos is this one abandoned diagonally in the middle of an aisle?
Could we ban conversation between cart-holders? Two people shopping together, same cart same list, is fine. But anything beyond “Hi, nice to see you” between two carts clogs the aisles
where do people live where people just talk to each other in public, I feel like I need to move their.
Rural areas. That comes with other issues though, like MAGA people.
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I think it’s very neighborhood dependent.
The worst places are in rich neighborhoods where all the bored middle managers act like queens and kings of the grocery store.
Only if we build similar airports. I understand not everbody is a regular business traveler, but somehow the people in front of me always seem fascinated with the novel concept of flying and airport security, spending 10 minutes emptying the pockets and putting their stuff on the conveyor belt.
'cause your plane would take off earlier if only these lame ducks in front of you were less lame. Also you’re going to miss valuable waiting time at the gate because of them. I feel your pain, but would you mind reading a little bit faster, I don’t have time ALL FUCKING DAY, please.
For me, I just hate standing in a queue for long periods of time. Also, in my town, queues can get up to ober an hour in security, propmpting peeple to potentially miss their flight or planes being delayed.
Rather sit at the gate for an hour than wait and stand in line for an hour to get through security
Couldn’t think of a way to go out of business faster than having a competent-customers-only policy.
I’ve almost never felt this, same with other comments here saying people can’t handle self checkout. Here in Sweden, at least in my city, people behave like you’d expect normal functional adults to behave. The only people who can be an annoyance are groups of kids/teenagers, and it’s very much not all of them either.
Sounds like sweden might have a higher average IQ amongst their population
pretty sure the average iq is always 100…
Maybe they just have less lead in the water and better education.
I live in the USA and it fine? Maybe its a walmart thing though I never go to walmart
Yeah, I can remember one or two specific instances of people choosing the worst place to stop and have a conversation, but the reason I remember them is because they happen so infrequently. I might need to say “excuse me” every so often, or squeeze by someone who didn’t leave a lot of space, but it’s never inconvenient enough to warrant remembering.
I live in the US. I go to the grocery store a few times a week, I’m a small trips kinda guy, and it’s close to my home. Nine out of ten trips are fantastic, but every so often you just come across a person who parks their cart sideways in an aisle, or parks next to one of the stupid fucking displays they put in the already-too-thin aisles. This is excluding, of course, folks who take stuff out of their cart and leave it anywhere, because either they don’t realize (or are to embarrassed, for some reason) that you can just leave it with a person up at the register. And at the self-checkouts I do, from time to time, see someone with clearly more than 20 items, though the store folks are good about not letting that happen.
I never go to Walmart, so I’m going to assume things are much worse there.
I remember my days as a cashier when a guy in his 50s came up to buy something and was just like “I don’t know how this works my wife does the shopping”. I just scanned his items and gave him the total. Once again he couldn’t understand.
I had to give this grown man step by step instructions on making a purchase. Including how to use a card for payment.
It was wild. Even in a world where his wife does the shopping has he never ran into a gas station for a snack or gone to lunch on his own?
Working retail, or any job with the public, is wild.
It might be a matter of just being under a rock for the last 10-20 years. Retail PoS systems have changed quite a bit in that time, but how you interface with gas pumps and dining, hasn’t changed at all.
Also: a lot of folks navigate digital systems by rote memorization and don’t read or think all that much. If you throw a new interface in front of them, just sit back and watch the bewilderment. Gotta give people like that time to learn it all.
Gas pumps no, grabbing a bag of chips from the gas station yes.
Sit down restaurants no, fast food restaurant yes*
*unless he only does drive thru
Even in a world where his wife does the shopping has he never ran into a gas station for a snack or gone to lunch on his own?
When you willfully reject responsibility, you don’t think clearly. Human capabilities like pattern recognition will be ignored.
Could just also have been outright fear. Waaay too many people did this for computers in the 90’s and 00’s They hit something they don’t understand and they just freeze.
I had this nurse out of state. She had worked her entire life on paper. Xeroxed forms, filled them out, filed them. She was only in her 30’s. We were a big healthcare company, and she started working for us. We had a strong need to have things digitized. She had just convinced her coworker to key in all her forms after she took care of them, but the situation was untenable. Her boss called me, we need her to have her own computer so she can learn to use it. AOK, I configured and mailed one right away.
Boss calls me back, a week later. so and so can’t get on. OH OK!, what’s the error? You’ll need to talk to her. That’s fine can you put her on? Ohh um she just left. K, can you have her call me when she gets back and we’ll sort it out right away.
A day goes by, Two, Boss calls me, So and So still can’t get on. She never called me, yeah let me put her on the line.
[muffled argument]
[long silence]
soandso: meekest voice hello
me: HI! let’s get you on your laptop, this should only take a second.
soandso: mumbles
me: i missed that, what was that?
[long silence]
me: I hear you can’t get on your laptop, let’s fix that. Did your password just not work? where did you get stuck?
[long silence]
soandso: mumbles
me: I can’t hear you, if you speak up a touch, we’ll get you going
[long silence]
soandso: almost a whisper I don’t know what to do
Me: quiet and reserved, shooting for soothing ok, that’s not a problem, we’ll go through step by step until it works, do you have the laptop in front of you?
soandso: a whisper yes
Me: is it open?
soandso: a whisper no
Me: ok, lets open it up, do you see a button on the front, you’ll need to press that and pull up on the lid
[long silence]
soandso: light sobbing it’s still in the box
me: [internally: JESUS] ok, no proble, let’s get that box open
90 minutes, in an hour and half, we got the box open, got the laptop out, opened it up, too a 5 minute break to sob and then re-collect herself. found the power button (this took 10 minutes alone) it was on the upper right of the keyboard, she made me walk her up from control, to shift to enter and so on. It came on, it was already setup for their wifi, all she had to do was enter the username and password which i had emailed to her boss and asked her to write it on a sticky.
She finally was on the desktop
soandso: morose now what
me: We’re done, you’ll need to work with your boss now to find out how to do your actual work on it, but you should be able to get in now.
She lasted another week before they fired her.
She was an RN, she knew medical coding, and she drove, she was just terrified of learning new shit
“15 items or less” lanes should charge extra for going over. 0-20 no charge, 21+ = $1 per extra item. That money goes towards whoever uses the register after you.
I’ll do one better.
Every extra item gets to be used against the customer to harm them.
The extra item is a can of tuna? Well, we’ll beat you with the tuna. The extra item is a hammer? Well, apologies my good man, but you know the rule.
We shouldn’t jump straight into violence, so how about after 5 minutes we’re allowed to beat them with anything from their cart, our cart, or the complementary whiffle ball bat?
I miss social distancing
I don’t. Not for shopping. I had to wait outside in line, in the freezing cold for an hour, when my state decided to limit the number of customers allowed in at one time. Sucked balls. That didn’t last long, fortunately.
Oh yes. It was great. People forced into distance. It’s all forgotten now.
how fucked up is our world that the pandemic was actually better?
It’s a little easier to see it that way as a survivor, especially if you didn’t lose anyone close to you.
that’s true. i was lucky to get out relatively unscathed. can we go back to the way it was, without the actual virus this time though?
I despise people with no manners to keep their distance. Here, people come so close to you, it would be classified as sex if we were naked.
And where there’s shadow, there’s also light. And the forced distancing was a great thing.
Dude I clean windows for a living. The amount of people that don’t see me and walk within inches is infuriating. I get that sometimes there’s not much room to walk around and I try to be understanding of that. But the amount of times there’s 5+ feet of empty sidewalk and people can’t be bothered to move 1 foot to the right while they step around me…
I don’t wash windows, but that is me while walking anywhere public. I’ll be hugging a fucking wall trying to leave space for people, while they’ll walk in the middle of the god damn sidewalk and still bump into me. Why do people not value personal space?
Oh man…why do people have to be so damn oblivious…
Could traffic cones help or do the passers-by just kick them?
People just walk into the cones and then say “oh I didn’t see it 😀”.
Do you want elitist grocery stores in LA? Because that’s how you get elitist grocery stores in LA.
No no, it’s not based on income, it’s based on social and spacial awareness. That’s just an example of one of the stores for the demographic left out of OPs idea!
I appreciate these, they keep the freaks out of Ralph’s.
