After stress-calling with Samsung’s customer service, I decided to run to the grocery store at lunch for some odds and ends and the DELICIOUS TORTILLA CHIPS THEY FRY IN THE STORE.
How do you feel about the express checkout lanes totals? Like I don’t surreptitiously count contents in other shoppers’ carts/trolleys/buggies (I’m trying to be more linguistically inclusive here), but if someone has a fuck ton of stuff and there’s a line, I admit I get mentally a little grumpy.
The lanes at my store are limit 12. How do you count groceries?
Like if someone had 4 oranges, I don’t consider that 4 separate items. But if they had 6 little containers of yogurt, I probably would consider that 6 separate things. I dunno, brains are weird.
ALSO grammar nerd alert. It should always be “## items or fewer“. Many places say “## items or less” and this is fucking wrong and they should feel bad. Fewer is used for countable nouns, less basically means “not as much.” I should eat fewer giant Panera cookies. I should drink less alcohol.
I think of the limit as the number of time I have to scan a barcode or enter an SKU.
I can’t find it on the web, but this just reminds me of an old Carol Burnett sketch where the express clerk keeps counting multiple of the same items, ending in Burnett stomping the everloving shit out of a bag of tomatoes and handing it to the clerk as ONE BAG OF KETCHUP.
Yeah, I’m with you, if I have 10 of the same thing, that is 1 item. My grocery store is all self checkout or anything goes. I love self checkout until I buy alcohol, use coupons or fuck up the item quantity, then u have to wait to get a worker to help.
I hate the self checkout lane in less I only have a couple of items. There’s not enough room in the bagging area for a full grocery order.
I love self checkout when I am in pissy mood and don’t want to interact with other people.
Ergo, I love self checkout.
…everyone loved good Will hunting but (imho) not enough people saw this movie
…I loved this scene…& generally enjoyed the whole movie quite a bit…so I’m impressed you went with this & not the now almost de rigeur stannis-from-game-of-thrones thing
…alas I have only the ability to star it the one time
Never watched GOT. Or Harry potter or LOTR, for that matter. Blasphemy, I’m sure.
Sames
…so…there’s a guy called stannis who picks up on the fewer/less thing in a couple of moments & then someone he pulls up on it takes to doing it to a couple of other people
…it became kind of a thing…although because it’s game of thrones & the author is who he is I think the first time it come up is in a conversation between him & a guy who he cut some fingers off who mentions having less fingernails to clean & his response is “fewer…fewer fingernails to clean”
…either way the truth is I think I’m mostly one of those annoying “the book was better” people so I don’t see why you should be expected to watch that stuff…although LOTR I guess I might be in the fence about
…on the one hand the movies skip stuff like tom bombadil &/or the huorns & other stuff that I loved…but on the other tolkien’s prose is clunky AF & the movies look kinda slick…could just be I’m still bitter that orlando bloom failed to make legolas as cool as I remembered him being in the book, though
Mostly same, except my LOTR geek friend dragged us to the cinemas for the first one.
My store offers an app which you can use to scan your groceries and then scan the app at self-checkout, so you can check out anywhere from 12 to eleventy-billion items and it takes as long to check out as it takes for you scan and pay. The only real downside is that if you scan less than 12 items it requires you to wait for a cashier to come by and audit your purchase, which is stupid.
…back in the hazy mists of time before there were cell phones I’m fairly sure I remember (I think in one of the massive “hypermarché” things in france) there being some places that let you scan things in with a barcode reader as you went around putting them in your cart…& being a bit amazed that people were trusted not to try & cheat that system
…also it always amuses me to remember that the french call carts/trolleys “chariots”…& thus when someone tried to translate the film title “chariots of fire” into french what they wound up with to the amusement of many was basically “flaming shopping carts” which was hilariously confusing…a bit like how folks in berlin were mildly confused that time kennedy insisted he was a baked good?
I wonder if they actually have analytics to back that up and what they are (presuming they exist)
Like
(1) do they run stats on regularity of customers and it trends that most regular customers purchase more than 12 items so it’s seen as lower risk
(2) are the majority of the purchases made by people with more than 12 items so economically they can absorb the cost loss if someone who buys 30 things fucks up and forgets to scan a container of yogurt
(3) is it just something as simple as their auditors/accountants said “you need to audit some of the orders!!!” and the employees were like “hey meemaw has 52 things in the cart, this will take all day!” so they said FINE 12 ITEMS OR FEWER, THAT SHOULDN’ T TAKE LONG
(4) they actually had stats on the kinds of people who intentionally steal things from grocery stores and it’s typically orders of 12 items or fewer
I have lots of questions and the answer is most likely “well the store manager said just check when there are 12 items or fewer, so that’s what we do.”
😂🤣🤔😐 Yup. I think this is probably the answer, knowing how retail corporate is
WELL ACTUALLY that less/fewer distinction is kinda crap. I know, I was taught exactly what you said in high school too. But then I was listening to some linguist (might have been on a podcast?) telling the story of how the less/fewer distinction came from a single guy in maybe the 1800s who published an English style guide; he invented the idea of the distinction, but they had previously been used interchangeably. So then upper class people who prided themselves on proper English started using it that way, but it was never universal usage.
As time goes by, I find myself more and more feeling like whatever language gets your point across is correct language.
Oh, but you’re 100% right on counting items. If they’re something that gets weighed altogether during checkout, that’s one item.
…I’m a fan of respecting the rules of language…but I think in a lot of ways it’s because I had a teacher once who said that while language is dynamic & rules are made to be broken it’s still important to know the rules so that when you break them it means something other than “I didn’t know any better”
…they were talking about poetry at the time…but I pretty swiftly came to think that it was true of a lot of things?
…so I’m with you on usage eventually overcoming what’s formally correct…but also down with the distinction in meaning being something that’s worth remembering?
Yeah that’s a fair stance. I used to be very uptight about grammar, but as I started learning more about linguistics (and this was probably all post college, just documentaries and thinkpieces and such), I recognized a lot of elitism in my own attitude. And unfortunately that’s where a lot of grammar rules have come from historically – the privileged class making rules to distinguish how they talk from the plebs. And you see this same attitude play out now when people make fun of AAVE.
I’m not entirely sure where my position falls now, because I still get irrationally angry when people misuse there/their, for all intensive purposes, etc. I mostly just try to remind myself to be cool about it. And I no longer correct people who use “begging the question” to mean “raising the question”, because common usage has changed the meaning of that phrase.
For anyone dying for a cat update from me – I called around vets today and no one would quote me more than the consult fee. And there are no vet ophthalmologists around who take PetAssure, so that’s a no go. I set up a consult (which will run me $223) and I guess I’ll have to go from there.
Well, shit. Thank you for the catto update.
I was interested in the cat update. One of our Chihuahuas has been to the pet ophthalmologist a few times.
Can I ask what for?
I’m hoping she can either reassure me that everything looks fine, or that they can do surgery that won’t cost me thousands and has a decent likelihood of success.
This particular girl, Violet, came to us via the puppy mill rescue, although she was the small dog in a 50-dog outdoor hoarder pack. The litany of her health issues has been tremendous over the past years, ranging from physical to mental. She is a poor soul. In the case of her eye problems, abraided corneas that were not getting fixed by regular veternarian treatment.
I think any cart ballparked near the qty limit is okay. If it says 15, and I’ve got 17, I’ll still go express. If I’ve got 23, ehhh maybe not. Multiple items of the same? Probably count them as one since they’re the same SKU. Again, as long as it’s close to the target #, I don’t think it’s a big deal.
Yeah I admit I rarely count what I have in my cart. I just kinda eyeball it.
I have been pulled from regular lane w/ full cart to express lane & always feel guilty when someone comes up behind. Hey, not my fault! Especially since my favorite store is not in the nicest part of town.
Ooh that always makes me feel uncomfy, too! Like I’m cheating.
dont have express lanes here…. we do however have self scan….and i fucking love those
not only do they give you a little pistol for scanning things as you go (i obviously need to make pew noises whenever i scan anything) but they also largely take you at your word that you scanned everything
i may occasionally forget to scan a thing or two……
Oh fuck yeah the sound effects are practically mandatory!!!
Every once in a blue moon when I use the self scanner thing the cash register starts blinking at checkout and the attendant has to come over and do an audit and check maybe five random items, and I always stand there paranoid that I forgot something. Fortunately I’ve never been caught. I hope I don’t forget someday and end up in grocery store jail.
I always assume there are big fights and grocery store HQ between the self scanning team and the loss prevention team, with the self scanners yelling about how it’s not worth scaring away customers and increasing the number of cashiers, and the anti-theft team yelling about how much they lose when people walk away with unscanned bacon.
over here..or at least in my local super they dont give a fuck…if you do get caught out by a spot check they just send you to a regular checkout with whatever you have so that any items you may have *forgot* get paid for
I avoid the self checkout because I am almost always buying alcohol. And, while it seems to maybe be slightly better now than it was when it was first introduced, I tend to have a disproportionate amount of problems with it – the machines are broke and don’t take cash, the scale is broke and can’t figure out when you move something, they don’t accomodate using personal bags very well, inevitably some bar code is just not in the system (how?), or for some reason the algorithm decides I’m trying to cheat/steal, and just freezes up until the attendant comes over.
And I’m reminded of that old Simpsons episode, where Homer and Apu are shopping and Apu steers Homer away from the express line, to a line full of youngish men who don’t talk.
When it comes to express lanes, I just kind of ballpark it. I try not to be that asshole with twice as much as allowed, but I’m also not counting each koolaid packet separately.
I hate self scanners and generally refuse to use them if there is any other option because they take away jobs. The local grocery store put in 8 self scanners and fired 5 cashiers. Fuck THAT noise.
Is being a cashier a crap job? Most of the time. Is it still a job, with a paycheck? Yup. Is it a job that people who have minimal education or training can do, unlike every other damn place that wants a college degree for basic skills? Yup. Should we be taking away jobs from people who may not have any other option? Nope.
We don’t have a choice at our store. They have 1, sometimes 2 manned checkouts but rest are self. I miss interacting w/ them but no longer an option. I’m sure they lose more to self checking liberties but make up in less manpower. It hasn’t seemed to effect jobs at our store, just duties but big picture, not so sure.