Technology

You force me to check out my own groceries. Fine.

But don’t get pissed when I have a lot of groceries and have to move my bags because you gave me one square foot of space to bag everything. That’s often my biggest frustration. The robot thinks I’m trying to do some shady stuff, and I’m not.

Remember everyone. If you see someone shoplifting from Walmart, no you didn't.

Fuck Walmart

Ever since the pandemic, curbside pickup has been the norm at our house for groceries.

We use Kroger, not Walmart, but I had a recent experience relevant to share.

I was out running an errand and my spouse asked me to go grab a couple items from Kroger since it was nearby.

I hadn’t been inside the store in like a year, so I was surprised to see gates at the door that opened and closed upon approach and walking away.

Also, while shopping, at some point suddenly the wheels on the cart locked up, causing me to bang the ever loving shit out of my shins on the cart frame. That’s when I got to learn about the new “anti-theft” wheel lock tech being used on all carts now.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I wanted to flip the goddamn cart over and kick the absolute shit out of it… but I knew that wouldn’t help.

…But if I read a story about someone going and drilling holes in every single one of those cart wheels, or setting fire to them all, or breaking the gates, I would laugh.

I imagine as soon as someone gets something worse than bruised shins and brings a lawsuit against these stupid companies, we will see these stupid things go away… but until then, I’m not fucking stepping foot inside any store that has that bullshit.

Some loss is the expected result of replacing workers with customers. Even cashiers who are paid and trained to check out customers have a failure rate of about 1%. Walmart treating their customers like criminals for things that routinely happen to even their own trained and incentived employees is ridiculous.

I'd get hostile too. This wastes literally everyone's time, employee and customer. Walmart and other companies already write off all their losses as tax write offs. It would actually be more cost efficient to do literally nothing. But it's not about preventing theft. It's about proving a point: that corporations control you.

Maybe they should keep some non-self check registers open then. I was a grocery store cashier in high school and college and I got $20/hour for doing it (adjusted for inflation). Right now if I see a store only has self-check open I will walk out, what I want to do is start tracking my time then mailing in a 1099 and an invoice for my time.

I'd never think to harass the poor employee who has nothing to do with the store managenent's decisions...

However, when I'm pissed or tired I'll sometimes be rough or sloppy with the machine, and I get pissed if they have too few manned checkouts for how crowded a store is. Banging items against the scanner glass, tap selections on the touch screen forcefully with my ring etc.

To keep the self-checkout machines company, I'll act like a machine too. If I unsuccessfully attempt to scan something, after 5 tries I "timeout" and move onto the next item.

I don't know about you, but I get annoyed that I still can't use NFC at checkout. It's 2023, tap to pay has been around in the US since 2016 and much longer in Europe.

The last few times I've walked into a Walmart, the place has been a disaster.

Shelves empty and in disarray, no evidence that they ever did carry the product I was after, the building in an increasing state of disrepair.

I'm done with this company.

Of course. Sometimes it doesn't work. Often times it's an honest mistake that a cashier themselves may have made. And now WalMart is treating you, a paying customer like a criminal.

Not at walmart, but one of our supermarkets in town has two self-checkouts. I tried them a few times, and they were so f-ed up that I gave up on them. One time, the machine did not accept any cash, but was stuck in the menu choice "pay by cash" without a "back" button. So I took my stuff to the normal checkout, which had the problem that my steaks had already been scanned. Solution: leave a bag of 20+ Euro meat at the checkout, and get a new one from the butchers shop.

It's funny, my local Walmart ditched the weight checking part of the self checkout so it's quick and easy, yet every time I go at least one person has managed to fuck up badly enough to need to call help over

Meanwhile I'm getting a decent discount on my purchase, which is nice

I don't understand people that get upset and hostile at employees in these situations. When I go through self checkout I go in with expectations already set that it's very likely that at some point during the checkout process the machine is going to trigger an alarm and an employee will need to come over and override the alarm. It doesn't happen too often, but when it does my first reaction isn't to get all pissy and throw things at the cashier.

If you have no patience for this sort of thing, then go through the regular checkout. See if it takes longer going that route.

I bought jelly and the age restriction went off. The clerk came and I had my ID out to check. We both had a laugh

Normalize leaving your groceries in the cart and leaving the store, and finding another store that doesnt make you bend over backwards to pay for your shit.

Ohh man i fucking hate self checkouts with a passion the soulless passive agress voice. The voice annoynecemnts to scan rewards card to take groceries to take recipt the 3 different "would u like to dobate to x" that constantly swap wheres the yes and no button is. Then sometimes it just fucking freezes and cos the bloody product isnt heavy enough to detect and it wont give me the ability to scan something till the other thing has been put down. I have no multiply button so if im buying 30 of something then i have to get a godamn employee to go into the employee section and hit the multiply button or my inabiloty to remove something once scanned. It all pisses me ofd so much. I do however have to say aldi has figured it out and i hope they dont go down the route of everyone else.

It almost pisses me off as much as ordering food via a qrcode and then being asked for a fucking tip. Im in australia we dont tip cos we have a fucking decebt minimum wage. But why does the fucking robot need a tip it disnt have exemplary service its a fucking machine.