The Car Was an Early-Drop-Off but the Service Writer Cannot Read Cursive, So No Service Was Performed…

General Discussion
106

Walmart is shutting down a lot self-checkouts and not just in New Hampshire… I’ve written before that my son is an itinerate Master Electrician. He’s single and he’s union (International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW)) and he travels from one big job to big job. He is licensed in over 30-states and he travels to each job (call centers, freight depots, solar farms, etc…). He takes these types of jobs because the pay cannot be beat.

Since he RVs and is willing to stay on site, he’s a favorite since the bosses consider him on 24-hour call, which he does not mind since he gets time and a half for anything over 8-hours, with night differential after 12PM.

His home base is in Michigan and that is also where he banks. He has direct deposit into his bank account and he has been getting his spending cash at Walmart. He will shop for the items he needs and go through the Self-checkout. He will ring up just one item and pay for it with his credit card, but the checkout will allow his to get cash back, up to $100 per transaction. So, when he needs spending money, he shops at Walmart, buys some items-one at a time, and he gets cash back with each transaction, usually several hundred dollars…

If he used the various ATMs in the differnt locations, he usually has to pay a transaction fee, but Walmart does not charge any fee for cash back…

He has been stopped a few times by the Walmart folk trying to figure out if he is somehow scamming the machine, but they have to admit, it all proper…

He says that when he tries to get back cash back at a cash register, with a working cashier, he usually can only get $20 and then has to go through the line again…

He’s working a Solar Farm in Indiana now and he has visited some Walmarts with closed down Sel-checkouts… So, if Walmart closes all its Self-Checkouts or changes their cash-back policy, he’s going to have to come up with something else…

Who remembers the On-line Order and Self Pick-Up cabinets that Walmart once had? A few years ago, our local Walmart put these in… If you ordered an item (not too large) on line and paid for it, you could print out the slip and when the item came in, you would go to Walmart, walk up to the Pick-Up Scanner and have your receipt read, it would tell you which draw or cabinet your item was in and the draw or cabinet would pop open and you could just pick up your item without waiting for an associate to go look for it in the back room.

But 'lo n behold, it soon disappeared and was no more. I do not know what went wrong with that…

Our local Lowes also put one in, but never implemented it, I asked them why when I had only ordered an overhead light and it was relatively small and I had to go to Customer Service to have an associate go locate it out back. They said that too many items do not fit the cabinets and that it was a waste of time dragging the items out and only having to drag them back…

They cabinets are still located behind the customer service area, unused…

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107

I think it might have more to do with the time involved by stocking clerks to pull the order. If you pull an item off the shelf and go check it out, it cost them nothing, but if they have to do it for you, it is an added expense, around here they are barely able to keep the shelves stocked. Let’s put it this way, the people stocking the shelves don’t appear to be in much of a hurry. When I was 14 at the greenhouse we were re -potting some flowers. I thought I was working pretty fast, but the guy I was working with said you are going to have to work faster. Which I did. I found out a person has multiple speeds to getting work done and the hourly rate is the same fir the employer.

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Interesting, where I live anything from the smallest convenience store to the biggest big box store is fully stocked. The one exception, though we are out of the path of the hurricane, bottled water was gone from the grocery store. I have been through quite a few hurricanes, I don’t worry unless one spawns a sharknado :grinning:

Somewhat car related, one store has 23 spaces reserved for curbside pickup, have never seen more than five ever in use. Some customers ignore the signs and use them a parking spaces.

109

I can’t say I agree with that. We order from Lowes, Home Depot, Walmart, Target, the Army Air Force Exchange (Base Exchange…) and a few others… And every last one of our orders arrive in shipping boxes with the stores address of the store and a reference to our order as if they came from a central shipping location. I have never experienced picking up an item that I have ordered online as if it was picked up off the shelf within the store and that includes items that the various web sites said there are plenty of that item in stock.

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110

None of these are in NH. In fact - NH Walmarts are expanding self checkouts.

111

I don’t like the self checkouts because the AI voice yells at me and insults me. I was on my way to the grocery store and stopped at an automated car wash. It wouldn’t take my credit card and I only had a couple of $20 bills in my wallet. I put in a $20 bill for the $8 car wash and it returned $12 in quarters.
When I got to the grocery store, I decided to get even with the automated checkout. I decided to pay my $12.17 tab by using up the quarters. The automated checkout screamed at me “Don’t you have anything besides quarters”? This made me angry, so I started feeding in pennies. The AI voice really got nasty. “Look, you old geezers. There are people waiting to use the checkout. Don’t you have a credit or debit card like normal people”? I continued to feed in the quarters and other loose change I had in my pockets. When my tab was paid, instead of the voice in the automated machine saying “Thank you for shopping our store”, it said, “Look buster, the next time you shop this store, use the checkout lane with a person”. That is why I don’t use the scan it yourself checkout machines. I also have trouble separating the plastic bags at the self checkouts. I like having a live cashier bag the items for me. I also shop the store enough that the cashiers know me. To the self scan checkouts, I am just another old geezer.

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112

I tend to accumulate a wad of one dollar bills in my pocket, so I try to use them at the self checkouts. The wrinkled ones get rejected even though it says legal tender.

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113

Concerning the first quote above, I missed the reference in the article that it was occurring in Canada… and I thought you were referring to Walmarts in your area… Sorry, my bad!

Cute story, I enjoyed reading it…

My nightmare experience with a change machine occurred back in the mid-'80s at a discrete military installation, west of the Mississippi… It was a small installation with no chow hall and only a small snack bar and some vending machines in a break room. The snack bar was definitely a place of last resort, so you either brown-bagged or ate what you could find in the vending machines.

I only had little bit of change but “luckily” they had a dollar changer, but I only had a couple of $5.00 bills and a $10.00 bill. Again, “luckily” the changer would take a $1 or a $5 bill. So I inserted a $5, and out came 4-quarters and 4-Susan B. Anthony dollar coins…

Well, what I wanted cost more than the 4-quarters and the loose change in my pocket and not one of those machines, including the change machine took a Susan B… I had to put in the other $5 to get enough quarters to eat…

The nightmare really came trying to pass those Susan Bs, businesses hated them, cash registers only had 4-slots for coins (pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters). I had to take them to the bank to finally get rid of them…

Do you remember the old Pepsi Commercial of a guy putting in a wrinkled dollar over and over again at a desolate gas station? I still snicker when I think of it…

114

You should definitely avoid Whole Foods markets because their self-checkouts ceased accepting cash about one month ago. In addition to speeding-up the process, I never actually saw anyone at the Princeton Whole Foods store use cash, so it probably didn’t impact a significant number of patrons.

Just to keep this transportation oriented, that WF store is one of the stops on the Weekend Shopper route of the university’s Tiger Transit electric buses. Princeton U has a fleet of 17 electric buses, and they provide free transport to anyone in the area, not just their own students.

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115

Can you provide a link to a credible source that supports that contention? As far as I can determine, that incompetent Emergency Management Director has been employed–steadily–in various capacities, in Hawaii, since 2007–which was 10 years before the Las Vegas massacre.

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Agreed, a credible source, not a source that defends itself in court “no reasonable viewer would believe us”.

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117

You can just bing John Pelletier in USA.Com. Maui police chief who was the Las Vegas incident commander for the shooting. You can google but appears to be sanitized.

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Pelletier was not the Emergency Management Director in Maui. That post was held–until his resignation–by Herman Andaya, and he is the one who is believed to be at fault (along with–possibly–Hawaii Electric) for the outsized loss of life.

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Incident commander in Las Vegas. Maui police chief. Just to clarify. Of course the police chief is part of the formal incident command structure, as the sheriff was in Las Vegas. Of course John will provide full detail on all the questions just like in Las Vegas, soon as he has time (not).

Such as: why was funding diverted from grid improvement and grass cutting? Why was early ambulance activity not shared? Why was the power not shut down? Why was water not provided for fire fighting? Where are the mass feeding locations usually provided by the guard? What are the shirt and longer range housing plans? Why were volunteer boaters not allowed to dock to provide immediate supplies? What is the status of the land leasing negotiations and who benefits from a fire? Why were building permitting procedures changed to empower a single non elected individual? Why were the exit roads blocked by police? And on and on and on. Either totally unprepared or total incompetence or worse.

As bob would say, the answers my friend are blowing in the wind.

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120

So, it’s all a conspiracy?

121

What else is new?

122

So it seems…

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Wasn’t it you that said never to attribute it to a conspiracy where gross incompetence can explain it? A lot of gross incompetence going around but luckily no corvettes were lost. FEMA will get right on it as soon as class is over.

Just to put it in perspective though, the Boston coconut grove fire killed about 400. The Chicago school fire killed a little over 100. These were studied to death and resulted in many changes. There are still 2000 kids that were sent home instead of sheltering at the school that are still not accounted for, so this is no minor incident. The people just want answers not diversion.

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124

Yes, I probably did state that, or something akin to it.
However, for every bit of the probable incompetence that you allege to have taken place to have occurred, it would have to have been a massive conspiracy.

I don’t see it that way, but it seems that you do.
:thinking:

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Your words not mine. The sooner the answers are forthcoming the better.