Check It Out

You know, I hate people. I'm a misanthrope. That's why I was elated when HEB started having those self-service checkout lines so people can quickly go through and pay for their stuff quickly without dealing with any highschoolers who don't really care about their job as long as they get paid so they can go hang out and party all weekend cashiers. Oh just kidding. No offense. I really don't hate people by the way. It's all an act. Really. Anywho, what a pleasant surprise these self checkouts were. Unlike the Automated Postal Centers which I abhorred to no end, HEB really hit the mark this time, providing a very user friendly touch screen managed point of sale system that is intuitive and impressive. Well, as self checkouts can get anyways.

You Touch Screen to Begin. And then start swiping your food items across the scanner, while the screen itemizes each item for you. You put your scanned item in the bag. Rinse and repeat. Click Pay Now, and you are prompted what method of payment you are going to use. So you choose debit card. Swipe and enter your PIN and you're authorized, not even having to sign anything. You can even get cash back if you want there, so you don't have to make that extra trip to the bank. Yeah. And get this, you don't have to swipe for each food item! You pay for it all at once!!* Verify the total and then it's all done. Grab your items and go. You've just been checked out. Not bad not bad at all. I'm so happy I could get an ICEE from that ICEE machine staring at me right behind the customer service counter there at the self checkout area. Mmm ICEE. Of the Coke variety.

Then one day I go to Wal-Mart. Voila, those bandwagon-jumpers I tell ya, as they have wasted no time at all and installed some new self-checkout registers of their own in retaliation. Not that there regular number of cashiers are lacking or anything, since there's always like 50 cashier lines, and only 2 that are actually functional and taking customers. C'mon. A little more manpower couldn't hurt. Or aren't y'all able to. Might as well hire some illegal workers or something to save money. Oops sorry, been there done that. Oh yeah funny thing is the migrant workers learned the American way and sued Wal-Mart for hiring them. What a tangled web we weave indeedy. It's all about me, me me. Getting rich. What can I gain from this, who can I take down with me. What happened to the simpler days of life. Tending sheep. Retrieving water from the well. Working the harvest. Simple days.

Oops tangent alert. I digress. Back to the story at hand. So I decide to take a gander on this Wal-Mart self checkout stand and see how it goes. This should be a piece of cake I think. Well it ends up scanning one of my yogurts twice and I try to cancel. But then I put the yogurt in the bag. And lo and behold the weight sensor kicks in and tells me the weight is incorrect. The deal is it remembers the weight of the bag, so of course you can't accidentally sneak in groceries that you paid for. Well the fact of the matter it did, and it counted like my Key Lime Pie yogurt twice and I just have 1 or something, so the weight is not increasing two fold like it thinks it is. I'm about to punch out the screen in frustration. Well not really. But I just want to be able to put my yogurt in the bag!!!. Is that too hard to ask?! C'mon. So finally had to wave on of the girls attending to the self-checkouts over and override and remove that extra yogurt from my list. Long story short, that fixed it and got my bags and left. Never will I use those self-checkouts again. Not even for a free yogurt.

There are kinks that definitely need to get worked out. That experience was just like the Automated Postal Center. Sometimes again, faster is not necessarily faster nor better. The tortoise and the hare. Need I say more? I rest my case.


*See Automated Postal Center for reference.