Wednesday, January 11, 2012

My Purse Isn't Produce You Moron!

This is one of the most loathed pieces of technology I have ever encountered.  Who exactly is this supposed to benefit I ask you?  This is how it invariably goes:  you have two items in your hands.  You are standing behind either a man who is trying to ask out the checkout girl or behind a woman who is giving the cashier her life story and she is only just to high school graduation.  You look askance, there it is, gleaming, promising a quick egress from this store.  You switch to the self-checkout.  This is where the trouble starts.  First you start to dig for your keys with your store card.  Your purse hits the scanner which it seems to take as produce.  The machine then demands you remove the produce, except There Is None!  But the machine Does NOT believe you!  It keeps asking you to now put the produce on the thingy to be weighed.  The attendant has to intercede.  Sigh.  Okay then you scan your two items.  The second doesn't ring up the right price.  You begin fussing at the machine:  "It's on sale!  I scanned my card, you should take 56 cents off!  Come on stupid thing."  You decide that the 56 cents isn't worth it, but now you are ticked cause that was the price of two pieces of gum wasted right there.  Then you slide your credit/debit card.  It doesn't work.  At this point you start to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness because you could have waited to check out and told the cashier Your entire life story by now.  Then the attendant has to approve your card and then give you the receipt manually.  So I ask you who did this benefit?  Not you, the shopper, you are ticked at an inanimate object that cheated out of some insignifcant amount of change.  It doesn't help the workers because they have to stand there and approve your card and make sure you are stealing bananas.  This was a wasteful and frustrating invention. 

I'm so glad that the internet is there for these moments of catharsis. 

Take away message:  Stay in your line, avoid the self checkout!

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