Friday, July 9, 2010

Grocery Store Scanners

For those of you not fortunate enough to know about this, I'm going to tell you about something great that one of our local grocery store chains adopted but that I discovered more recently. Get ready....

The in-store scanner. What you do w/this handy machine is scan your grocery store member card at the main machine. A scanner lights up & you take that with you to scan your items.

Once you've scanned all your stuff (even if you've got 5 shopping carts full of things), you get to go to the Self-Checkout register. You scan the scanner on the part indicated at the checkout stand & your entire total is entered into the computer. You pay, get your receipt & get the hell out of there.

We LOVE this thing, I'm not kidding. You don't have to wait for some slow cashier or shopper with enough food to feed all the African nations for 2 months. No mysterious items scanned in b/c your child decided to grab items off the shelf when you weren't looking. No long lines b/c the store management refuses to staff the proper amount of people due to greed or orders from the dickwads running the corporate sector.

It's a brilliant invention that saves time & is long overdue in my book.

Now I know here in union friendly NY, people would piss & moan about job losses among low skilled workers. Let's consider a few things.

1. These jobs pay nothing.
2. Many, many people don't bother having any kind of work ethic & make the shopping experience suck for many of us (I get to say this since I worked retail for 7 years & did do my job low rate & all, thank you very much).
3. Management is always trying to save a buck & aren't corporations first beholden to their stockholders? You can bet I'd be convinced to buy stock in a grocery store if they used scanners & kept some well trained staff who behaved appropriately to customers + were accessible if the machines messed up.

Even my husband, a union member, is anti-union when the union allows dead weight to keep working b/c they've simply not been fired when they were incompetent or lazy while people who are better workers are tossed by the wayside despite being far better at their jobs than the dead weight.

There's far too much protection given to lazy deadbeats in the whole union scheme so I think something new is needed. Something b/t no union at all & unions that provide no incentive to do anything above the bare minimum.

I don't know if this is going on in the South or other regions but why the hell hasn't Wal-Mart adopted this model? Aren't they all about dicking the low level workers? They'd at least stop being known as Ghetto Town in many places & stop hiring some of the rude asshole types who work at many of them. It might inspire more people to shop there since they wouldn't be waiting 30 years to buy some printer paper and a pack of soft drinks.

I still don't miss Wal-Mart & don't want to see it in NYC. Target is the better choice as well as some local businesses that have polite, properly trained staff members. I kind of hope the small business makes a comeback in the bad economy. At least decent ones, not overpriced shit holes run by deluded owners who obviously have zero experience in retail or the service industry as a whole. I cheer when idiots like that go out of business.

When the local comic book store in our neighborhood closed, I was thrilled since that guy overcharged & never bothered to search for anything b/c he was always doing inventory.

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