Not wanting to do free work for a company (they don’t even give you a discount if you use self-service) is being a boomer?
That’s the first time I’ve seen the word “boomer” on the opposite side of the word “sucker”.
Okay boomer
Exactly! Back in my day, people used to fill up my gas for me and carry my things up to my hotel room. Young people are getting lazy and entitled! Makes it hard to humiliate the poors if they make ME do the work.
Tbh back then the pay was more fairly in line with cost of living for some of the jobs. however, it has been a good 20 or so year since it was more fair. Nowadays, it is absolutely scary the cost of living. it’s down right criminal.
Refuse to do free work for a company—insist that the grocery store employees go and gather the items on your list from the shelves for you! Never set foot on the sales floor, do pickup orders online only!
Background: It used to be that the proprietor of a store brought items you requested to the counter for you. In 1916, Piggly Wiggly pioneered a new grocery store model, requiring/allowing the customers to pick items off of the shelves themselves. Not only did they not give you a discount for doing their work for them, they raked in more money from impulse purchases. The increased sales more than offset the increase in shoplifting losses. A cynical, corporate ploy to bleed customers dry, and we just think it’s normal now!
That is to say, the purpose of a grocery store is to provide food in exchange for currency. There’s no law of nature that I know of that says that having an underpaid teenager drag your food across the scanner is the only proper way to do check-out, just like there isn’t one that says only a store employee can pick items from the shelf.
Maybe you can go the warehouse and pick it up from the boxes, drive down to the farm to het the produce or, even better, grow your own food ALL THE WHILE STILL PAYING FULL VALUE TO THE SUPERMARKET.
“People used to have even more done for them and now they don’t and pay the same” is not the powerful argument for us having even less done for us that you think it is.
In other words, race to the bottom is race to the bottom.
Those jobs were not cruel and demeaning as you seem to imply. In fact plenty of industries still operate that way (auto parts etc.) and they served a valuable purpose, to give work experience to that underpaid teenager.
In fact if you go to a butcher shop, fishmonger, farm market etc. you will have your food handed to you by a human as well. And most people highly rate both the service and quality at such shops, with the employees usually being paid significantly more than at supermarkets, and having proper work hours and job security.
So yes, I suppose Piggly Wiggly made food margins a little thinner. But considering I get better meat prices at my butcher than at a supermarket, who do you think benefited from that move the most? Most likely the same ones benefiting from the move towards a fully automated store like Amazon tested.
I’m on Team Boomer on this one.
I am and I’m not. If it’s like 2 items, give me a self checkout. If it’s over 15. Bring on a cashier.
I always prefer self checkout because too many people suck at bagging.
Don’t put a leaking pack of meat with my deli you dumb shit. All while I see people pushing full carts that have meat touching produce…
The only place I trust to bag for me is Trader Joe’s. Tetris masters over there.
They still do bagging in the US? Greeters, too?
You buy meat pack that’s leaking?
To add to that, you don’t wash your produce before eating it?
I didn’t know there were places that even asked that.
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Then offer a discount for self checkout.
I hate self checkout. I work all day to then check out my shit and bag my own groceries? And pay 2x for the same food and less service than 5 years ago?
I feel like most memos in Walmart break rooms are this kind of fodder for shitposting material
Recently had a support call with a woman who was complaining about our 2 factor authentication system because she could only access one web page at a time. When I asked her if she couldn’t just open a new tab, she said she was too old to learn how computers work and couldn’t do that. She went on to claim that there’s a lot of people at her level of ineptitude, and that we shouldn’t have implemented 2fa because “most people don’t have multiple monitors.”
It was so, so hard not to throw out an OK Boomer as they proudly lectured me on the depths of their ignorance.
Can be funny for trivial stuff, but in the medical field this type of stuff is pretty messed up in my opinion. Some medical places implement stuff like that just because they refuse to pay people to staff the phones in scheduling.
Also, if the old lady doesnt want MFA thats her choice.
Mandatory MFA isn’t a bad thing though.
If an old lady doesn’t want to remember a password, should she be able to enter just her email/identifier without any verification?
MFA doesn’t really help much in the case of a tech illiterate person though, since TOTP codes can be phished just like username and password can. A scammer that calls them will just ask for the code in addition to the username and password.
My employer uses Yubikeys with FIDO2/WebAuthn for two factor auth, but that’s probably too complex for a non technical person to figure out (even if it’s basically just “press the button when it tells you to”).
Well, TOTP prevents at least these attack vectors, even for tech-illiterate people:
- Unnoticed data base leaks being used to gain full access to people’s accounts
- Credential stuffing (using another service’s leaked credentials to gain access)
With TOTP there must be at least some contact between the “hacker” and the victim.
I just think they should be able to opt out. Its up to the patient what their security posture is. If they don’t want it, they shouldnt be forced to have it. Just have them sign away their rights to sue the hospital or something along those lines.
I’m open to hearing an argument why it should be forced to use MFA even if the patient doesnt want it. I know at least one hospital my company works with that has it optional for patients who want it.
I think most people are just unaware of the risk that is involved. Healthcare information is some of the most sensitive data on a person and should be protected at all cost.
Some older people in particular have as much of a self-preservation instinct on the internet as toddlers in real life. If protecting them takes away a tiny bit of agency from them then so be it because they cannot be trusted with such decisions. I believe any reasonable person would use MFA because trading off a tiny bit of convenience for a significant amount of security is always worth it.
Most of these patients have already received emails from multiple healthcare organizations that their data was breached though.
The way medical data is stolen isnt through individual accounts usually unless you are famous or a politician.
There is a time when every person realizes that things have changed so much around them that they no longer understand how it works. It creeps up on you slowly, but in the Information age, that is accelerated. Every person here will experience some form of that at some point in their lives.
That’s entirely your choice, it’s not a requirement of life. You can continue learning new information, there’s nothing that forces you to give into ignorance. I’d also say there’s a pretty big difference between “I’m not a very tech savvy person” and “I am completely helpless and choose to make it other people’s problem.”
It’s a balance in many ways. There’s some aspect of refusing to do things due to not wanting to learn things. But sometimes people don’t want to adopt technologies simply because they’re unwilling to accept some very glaring downsides. For example, if you demand 2FA, you are demanding that your customers essentially consent to have an ankle monitor and remote audio monitor on their person at all times. Smart phones track your location 24/7, and they seem to track what is spoken around them as well. They are absolutely a huge invasion of privacy, and it’s remarkable we ever let them become as indispensable as we have. They’re basically just ankle monitors we all voluntarily put on each morning. I can absolutely see people just refusing to have a smartphone for the privacy implications alone.
I also have some red lines on technology. I refuse to use tiktok because of its privacy and psychological manipulation issues. And I’ve moved away from most social media, even if that cuts me off from some very useful communications and conversations in my family and community. I also refuse to buy any appliance with a wifi connection. I try to avoid any device that requires an app to use. If your widget requires an app but your competitor’s doesn’t, I’m buying from your competitor. If your widget requires an app and your widget is just something that would be nice to have, but not life-changing, I’m not going to buy your widget at all.
It’s a very dangerous thing to simply decry anyone who rejects a technology as ignorant or not tech-savvy. Often people reject particular technologies for damn good reasons. If we just accept the newest thing with zero thought simply for the fact that it is new, we are actually the ignorant ones. Something being newer does not automatically make it better. And often newer things are inferior to old things, like the case of a lot of privacy-violating appliances and companies filling everything with DRM and trying to turn it into a subscription. I don’t want basic household items to require an app to use, as it is guaranteed that the security on that system will be crap, and that the product will stop working after a few years after the company stops supporting the app.
If I’m buying a physical thing, I want it to be completely stand-alone and require zero continued feedback from its manufacturer in order to continue to function. You can tell me til you’re blue in the face about how spying on me helps improve the customer experience, but I’m still going to tell you to take your privacy-violating, app-dependent widget and shove it up your app-loving ass.
My father was 75 when his finances had deteriorated to the point where he was no longer able to afford a personal secretary.
He had me explain the things he had to do, and he wrote them down on paper, step by step. He was pretty quickly able to do all the things he needed to do on his desktop.
Never got fast typing down, so I got him dictation software. Anyway, I’m pretty convinced as long as your determined, you can stay hip to new technology in a way that at least allows you to work with it.
The difference is you. You enabled him and helped accommodate his needs. Without you, how’s he going to cope? Also you’re a good child.
Real US/Europe split here
No cashier packs your bag for you in Europe. Sometimes it’s a fun game trying to be faster packing than them scanning.
Netherlands :)
When I bring my banana through the cashier lane they give me a dirty look. But when I ride one of the lawnmowers inside and try to mount a self check out, I get kicked out of the store. MAKE UP YOUR MIND!
I mean, walmart could easily fix that by having fucking cashiers.
At the walmart I go to they put in like 60 self checkouts and have, maybe, one cashier running at a time.
I don’t mind self checkout as a concept. Its fine if you are just buying a couple things, or something you might be personally embarassing for you… but they are not a replacement for cashiers.
Cashiers and belts are needed to handle bigger purchases like monthly groceries and shit.
Unless you are gonna take 25% off my bill for labor savings, I am not going to take my monthly shopping through a self checkout. I had to once when I had no choice, and I’ll never do it again.
I’m 100% against self checkout.
They’ve put the burden of sale on you instead of themselves. If you fail to check something out accidentally, you are liable for theft.
If they don’t have a cashier, I go to customer service and tell them to ring me up even if it’s one item.
Not even cause the checker should have seen it but also what store prosecutes someone over 1 item
Which is why I’m against making people do big orders through self checkout, cause thats when an accident can happen.
Not when you’re getting your genital itch cream.
A lot of the grocery stores near me have a limit of 15 or 20 items for self-checkout. Safeway says “about 15 items” which is strangely vague. Any more and you have to go through a regular checkout.
i would say even 10 items is to much for self checkout, but thats better than walmart expecting you to take a cartful of monthly groceries through self checkout.
I can’t imagine a judge taking a case where someone unwittingly stole something
I admire your faith in our legal system but despair at you lack of imagination.
They’ll prosecute a bag of money for potentially being involved in a crime.
Do you live in the US? I do and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if that happens here
Depends how white you are
Don’t need to get to a judge. They can just tresspass you and then you have to drive 30 miles to another supermarket cause you cant ever set foot in that one again.
Thats enough to fuck shit up for a lot of people.
NAL, but i believe that they have to show intent in order to prosecute. As long as the legal system works properly, they would have to prove that you’re lying when you say “I forgot that was down there”
Walmarts keep the same number of cashiers before and after self checkouts are installed.
not in any walmart where i’ve witnessed the changeover.
I’m just basing it off of being married to a Walmart manager for 10 years but hey, maybe outsiders’ anecdotal feelings on the topic are more accurate than observed first hand experience.
Walmart is ALWAYS hiring cashiers.
Yeah, and you know where they are? stocking shelves and picking for the online pickup orders. Not running checkout lines.
That number is between 0-2 depending on how many cashier lanes there are.
You don’t get to be 3 of the richest people on the planet by paying for labor
Unless you are gonna take 25% off my bill for labor savings, I am not going to take my monthly shopping through a self checkout. I had to once when I had no choice, and I’ll never do it again.
I also faced that scenario once and walked out of the store leaving my $400 worth of groceries sitting in front of the abandoned cashier lanes. The profit from just my purchase would have paid for a full cashier shift that day. Instead they got to pay for restocking and ruined frozen food and meat.
Yeah and then I had a lady ask to check my receipt because there’s not enough room to put everything on the fucking thing all at once so I told her no and walked out.
It’s cute that you think 25% of your sale is going towards labour, even before self-checkouts became so commonplace.
Its cute that you are trying to twist what I said into something that I didnt say.
No wait, not cute. the opposite of that.
I said I want a 25% discount for doing their job and saving them the labor. Not that their labor is 25% of my bill.
I’m sorry you’ve taken offence to my throw away comment, as no offence was meant.
Is it actually “cute” that this person allegedly overinflates the worth of checkout labor, or were you being condescending?
Just curious, I have no idea what the real number is, what do you think it is?
I have no clue. I guess you can look at the profit margin for a supermarket (Walmart is around 2%, I just checked), then figure out the average full food shop spend, and finally see what the average hourly wage is for a worker and how long it would take to ring up a full shop.
Although, this also highlights why they can’t give OP 25% off as their margin isn’t anywhere near this figure. I guess we should also factor in handouts that companies like Walmart get from the government to subsidise their staff etc.
From reading a few reports, after looking this up, it seems walmart spend about 7% of it’s revenue on hiring, and about 32% on payroll. The other costs towards labor seem to vary greatly from source to source, depending on exactly what they take into consideration as a labor expense. So it is somewhere between 39% and 60% of the revenue.
So that other person was probably being super condescending for no reason? That’s kind of the impression I got when they said they had no idea the actual number.
Apparently they spend about 7.67% of their operating budget on labor. Just in case anyone was wondering. Source.
Thanks for posting this.
I would wager that a significant piece of that is centered around the logistics and distribution element. Cashiers are probably rounding errors.
What’s so bad with self checkout I run through it faster then a cashier does
If you have more stuff than will fit in the weighing platform it’s a logistical disaster. Hence why the belts and bagger system were invented in the first place.
I haven’t seen a Walmart with one of the weighing platforms in years, actually
They all use larger flat plastic coffee-table bits attacked to the machine now, there’s actually about as much room on it as is in a cart, and it’s really nice
You beep, beep, beep, and never have to worry about UNEXPECTED ITEM IN BAGGING ARE or anything like that
Not really you leave it in the cart and bag it as you scan it
And then put the full bags back in the cart right on top of the stuff you still need to scan?
There’s usually a platform you can leave 5-6 bags on till your cart is empty enough to through them back in there as you scan the rest
Yea no shit. Not everyone has the luxury of shopping as often as you do and we have to actually fill our carts. Also it sure seems like you are still using disposable bags which is a shame.
You act as if it doesn’t work the same way with a full cart cause it does, so what if I am that wasn’t even the subject
Reading the comments, do people not like self checkout? Is it another one of these American things, that baffle the rest of the world? Like grocery baggers. I’m European, living in Poland and Denmark and if given the choice, I will always pick the store with self checkout. It’s simply faster. Only old people don’t use self check out, not because of boomer ideology, but because they need the cashier’s help.
I recently moved, and my now nearest store does not have self checkout. It’s horrible. I spend more time waiting in the line than actually finding my items in the store. During the three years i used my previous local store, I only had to wait for an unoccupied self checkout maybe two times.
Self checkouts that just let you scan items without issue and accept payment are a nice enough idea for a bag or less of shopping, my problem with them is how they are implemented in reality (in Australia anyway). The first implementations I encountered I considered an useful addition but both the machines and the staffing changes due to them have steadily gone downhill in terms of user experience.
Instead of a quick painless experience you get a horribly touchy weight sensor which can’t reliably handle particularly small items, particularly large items, or non-standard bags (and there are no longer standard bags due to plastic bag bans), a machine which demands assistant intervention at the slightest issue (and the assistants are understaffed so never arrive quickly), and when you finally get to payment it makes you click through an annoyingly slow interface to tell it you don’t have a rewards card and don’t care to donate to some charity before it will activate the card reader. To make things worse the manned checkouts are never staffed at a level - if any are even open - to cater for people with full trolleys so these end up clogging up the self checkouts (which have tiny bagging areas and are not intended to handle a trolley load) and making everything slower.
The icing on the cake is the self checkout treating you like a thief and throwing errors if the camera system thinks you didn’t scan something in the trolley or letting off an alarm like you’re trying to make off with something when you just want to buy a can of paint.
Don’t forget the commercials before and after you pay FML
The minute they start playing ads in my country, I’m out. I’ll just start shop lifting to avoid standing in lines.
Yeah, I would rather wait for the one active checkout rather than have to go through the rigmarole of scanning one item, putting it in the bag, waiting for it to register before doing the next. The employees get to scan multiple things at once and do things like “scanned item x6”. Until self-checkout technology advances to the point I can do the same, it can fuck right off.
I’m from France living in Sweden and I’ve seen people not wanting to use self-checkout because it’s used to cut cashier jobs. Where you’d get 4 cashiers, you just get one person watching the self checkout. I’m personally ambivalent about because I do find it faster and convenient, but it is indeed a loss of jobs
I’m European too, living in Russia and I’ve never seen self-checkout that accepts cash. Despite seeing many vending machines that accept only cash.
…because it’s a non-sequitur and makes no sense as a response.
Corporate gaslighting be like:
