retail flashback

8/4/99

Lots of grocery store reminders lately. Last night on NPR we heard a piece on those grocery discount cards, and this morning I saw a bit on the news about the self-checkout machine, U-Scan.

We had Value Cards at my store in Lansing. It was a pain, asking each customer if they wanted to use their value cards. Many did, and saved up to a couple of bucks, though usually not more than 10 cents on the entire order. Many didn’t, and politely said “No.” And a few paranoid assholes went crazy, every time. Most of the cashiers learned to recognize the bad eggs and didn’t mention the card, but I didn’t ring on a register often enough to know. This bastard caught me on Christmas Eve:

(me) “Hi, did you have a value card you’d like to use today?”

(bastard) “No! I don’t have a value card! And I’ll tell you why!”

(me, thinking) “I hate this job.”

(bastard) “I don’ want YOU to access my life! I don’t want YOU to know my soicial security number! I don’t want YOU to see what groceries I buy!”

(me, thinking) “Right, like I didn’t just see them when I scanned them all.”

While he ranted I’d efficiently slid all his shit to the end of the lane, where the high school baggers were checking it out as they put it in the bags. “What does a moron buy?” they were thinking. When he paused for breath, I inserted an icy “28.64,” as if he’d been describing the weather and boring me out of my mind. He acted as though I’d offended him, and he handed me his credit card. What a moron.

I hated those people. I usually worked at the service desk, where people signed up for those damn cards. When people bitched that they didn’t want to write their social security number or their driver’s license number, I told them to forget about it. I encouraged them to lie. Most of them seemed to consider me as part of the problem. To them, I was the big toe of Big Brother, and by stomping n me, they just might win out over adversity.

So now that whole card idea is under attack. Some guy in some store somewhere went and slipped on a patch of spilled spaghetti sauce, and threatened the store with a lawsuit. The store threatened to reveal his history of purchasing alcohol. Doh. Others believe that employers are checking store databases to find information on prospective employees, like whether they buy cigarettes.

It’s become the next big consumer scam. My first thought was, boy, am I glad I don’t work in the grocery store anymore. I’ll bet the service desk got 500 requests the next day for accounts to be closed. And the desk clerks took it in the ass from a lot of bastard customers.

Okay. If everyone’s so upset about this, why participate? Why not lie? We certainly didn’t check to make sure you were using the right name. Why take it out on the clerks? We don’t care if you fill out the forms or not, and we don’t give a shit why or why not. And while we’re at it, quit being a bitch about putting your phone number on your check. We HAVE to ask for it. We’re doing our jobs. We don’t get paid to listen to your whining conspiracy theory, just give us a fake number and get the hell out.

Or: USE CASH.

The U-Scan machine is another so-called “convenience.” It’s touted as an “express” lane. And if everyone who used it was a genius, then sure, it might be kind of fast.

I was a fast cashier. Damn fast. I could ring up a large order in less than a minute. I knew all the produse codes from memory, even ginger root and jicama and daikon. Know what? Most cashiers are fast. Problems are usually on the customers’ end: price discrepancies (okay, that’s sometimes the store’s fault, but it’s almost never the cashier’s,) forgotten items. Tons of time is spent in the payment process—checks are the worst. When a manager is called to the lane, it’s often a check or credit card problem, like a forgotten driver’s license or an out-of-state check. Those are the customer’s responsibility, and the cashier is powerless to spped things up, but the cashier takes shit from all the other people in line.

So I stood in line at this “quick” new machine for about 15 minutes, watching clueless lay people attempt to sell themselves a few groceries. They stared openmouthed at the directions on the screen. They didn’t know how to scan things, and they did it very slowly. My favorite typical mistake is when they locate the bar code and then point it at the scanner and hold it there. The scanner can only read codes that are moving.

Nobody knew how to weigh produce. The machine had one huge flaw: before an item could be scanned, the previous item had to be placed in a bag. Annoying. The machine accepts cash and credit cards, so all those crazy nuts who wrote checks in the “express” lane had to be approved by an attendant, nullifying the whole “self-checkout” idea. A three-item transaction that would take a cashier 20 seconds took about 5 minutes on that handy U-Scan wonder.

Problems compounded when a guy got frustrated and walked away, leaving the transaction half-finished. That machine was tied up for 20 minutes while the attendant ran for a supervisor who could void the transaction.

So what I’m saying is, all this technology could use a little work. Advice for the common customer: have some frigging patience.