March 11, 2004

Stuff your Self Checkout

Our local Walmart has recently put in Self Checkout lanes. I guess they finally realized people don't enjoy standing in lines forever to checkout, but instead of actually putting employees in all those dozens of checkout lines they have, they had this brilliant idea to let customers check themselves out. They don't have to hire checkout people and the customers do all their own work. Brilliant! Except they suck.

Tonight we had to pickup a few items. We scanned a bag of pretzels and put it in the bag. The machine started complaining about safety and how this item should be removed. We took it out and put it in the other bag which already had some stuff in it, and the machine complained about putting unscanned items in the bag. I had to hold the pretzels. Then we put a loaf of bread in the bag and it complained again. To quote Johnny Cochran, "That does not make sense!" So we ended up putting all this stuff in one bag because the machine wouldn't let us do anything else.

I know what some of you are probably thinking. This is what I deserve for shopping at Walmart. Some of their stuff is cheap crap and I don't buy it, but come on, a bag of pretzels is a bag of pretzels. And as weird as it might sound, I've known a lot of people who worked at Walmart and they all seemed to love it. Who am I to tell people they are being exploited if they are not unhappy about it? I get tired of hearing about how evil big companies are. Maybe they do some questionable things in the name of the almighty dollar, but who doesn't? There's not a single grocery store out there that doesn't wish they'd thought of the Walmart ideas first, as much as they might complain about how unfair Walmart is as competition.

So the moral of this story? If I don't want to deal with stupid self checkout, I shouldn't go to stores that have them. If I don't want to deal with long checkout lines, I should, well, I don't know because every store has long checkout lines. I guess I could do all my grocery shopping at 11pm, but then there's probably just the one lane open and there's 3 people in line with full carts. So, pfft.

Published: March 11, 2004
Editor: stacy