heh the Costco here actually has a glass booth in the middle of the exit and 1 person at each side marking receipts and since we just had a cake it didn’t take long …but they were checking the big multipack items … in fact, when you buy one of the big cases of energy drinks/OTC medicines and a few other categories they make a mark of them like they do the receipts now …
Having been to Costco in both Canada and Mexico, my personal experience has been checking is at a superficial level. Obviously it is easy to ask the person to do more detailed checks. Should there be increased inventory loss at a given store, I would pretty much expect this. I don’t love waiting in line nor consider it a big deal. I weigh it against the advantages of shopping at Costco.
If Walmart wants even a second of my time beyond the transaction, they’re in effect asking me to be a volunteer employee. They want me to work for free. Their CEO made 22 million dollars in 2019. That CEO made a business decision to cut down on employees and security to the point that they now need random people leaving the store to “work” for them for free to curb retail theft. I’m not volunteering to subsidize that business model.
I’m trying to figure out how wanting a second of your time is in effect asking you to work for them. What work are you doing, exactly, by standing there with your cart? Are you working for them when you wait in line to check out? How about when you can’t find an item you’re looking for? Or you have to wait to return an item at Customer Service?
As I said, I don’t like paying for the goods other people shoplift. I wish they’d knock it off. If waiting at the door at Costco for a minute after a 30-minute shopping trip keeps me from having to pay for a portion of shoplifters’ haul, I’m in effect paying myself in the money I save.
It’s absolutely amazing how similar the attitude of “I won’t waste my time to help in the epidemic of shoplifting” is to “I won’t wear a mask to help in the epidemic of COVID.”
Next they’re going to be boasting about how they never wear a shirt or shoes because it costs them precious seconds of their incredibly valuable lives and other people exist solely to give them service.
I totally understand the annoyance of receipt checking. But to declare it as the biggest waste of time is absolutely absurd. 5 seconds of being an empathetic human to another human that has to do such a shitty job is such a chore? Suck it up. Choke on your misplaced rage like an adult. Then go about your life, wasting 5 seconds of your time however you wish.
Indeed. It’s this weird toddler-like mindset that certain people have of “Someone else is asking me to do something. No one can tell me what to do!”
Shit, I spend more time going up and down the parking lot aisles trying to find a place to park at Costco than I’ve ever spent in the receipt checking line. People are serious weenies.
So does BJ’s Wholesale Club.
Interesting. I have noticed they mark the receipts but I never knew why before now. But it makes sense.
never mind, still thinking…
One big difference between ‘Walmart’ receipt checks and ‘Costco’ receipt checks is that the major discount stores tend to have enough (and competent enough) checkers to keep up with everyone leaving. They make it a condition of membership to do the check, but also make it so that it’s at worse a very mild inconvenience. And it’s clearly part of their regular operation, so it just flows properly.
At places like Walmart, when they decide to do receipt checks it’s almost always one employee who isn’t used to the job handling a lot of people, and there’s a line to get out. I will just say ‘no thanks’ as I walk past the line of people being checked. I don’t have any obligation to stay, and while I don’t mind waiting for half a minute for their benefit, I’m not spending more than that waiting for ‘permission’ to leave the property that I don’t require to be on my way.
The ‘epidemic of shoplifting’ comparison is hilariously desperate and unreasonable, but does bring up the fact that I haven’t been to a Walmart since the pandemic, since from what I’ve heard the ones near me tend to be full of plague rats, so this is theoretical for what will almost certainly be more than a year. I would be much less inclined to wait if I did go to one now, since spending extra time waiting in a line with people increases the risk to me and them.
This. Which is why I avoid all those places.
Further by being a Costco shopper you’ve already demonstrated a willingness to wait in a monster line to check out. Waiting in two such lines to leave the store is evidently acceptable to such folks.
I’m not buying the self-righteous BS upthread; not even a little bit.
But I do value customer service that doesn’t waste my time. I routinely abandon shopping carts in stores with long checkout lines and unopened cashier stations. If I can catch a manager’s ear along the way to tell him/her why I do so. If not, perhaps they’ll figure it out. Eventually. As I sorta said in another thread recently:
We don’t get the customer service we want. We get the customer service everybody else is willing to put up with. Long lines are efficient for them, not for me. I support the places without long lines. You’re welcome to support whatever you want. But understand the consequences of your decisions.
So now an employee has to be pulled away from a line to put back everything you were too lazy to do yourself. All your behavior does is to make things worse. But you get to play big man, so yay to you for being a jerk.
Could be. Here’s another take:
I really prefer to find a manager and tell them why. I’ll spend time trying to hunt one down on the floor to do that. I see it as a public service, me investing my time in driving a business towards understanding that their shortsighted choices are costing them money and customers.
It’s very inefficient for me to do this. I then need to go to another store and re-load a different cart with the same goods. Or I need to come back to this one at an off-peak time and again repeat my effort.
Be the change you want to see. I want to see businesses that have enough cashiers on duty so wait times are minimal. So I do the things that I believe will encourage that behavior. Silently grousing in line while accepting the unacceptable because its “easy” is the dumb, shortsighted, and ultimately selfish anti-social thing to do in my POV.
YMMV.
Serious question; where do you guys do your shopping? I don’t live out in the sticks but Walmart is my only practical option for a lot of things I buy. I could drive thirty miles to go to a Target but that would be pretty much the same conditions.
Personally, if I’m unhappy with the conditions in a store I just leave. If I’m unhappy on a regular basis, I stop going there. But I’ve never felt the need to tell any employee that I’m leaving.
I’ve actually seen a checker at Costco cross checking item descriptions (maybe even SKUs?) versus cart contents. Took unbelievably long. I have no idea if the guy was new, they were delaying the customer until the cops got there, or some other reason, but it took about as long as you can imagine. I want to say the employee did it to more than one shopper before another line opened and I could get out of there.
As already noted upthread, it’s part of the membership agreement I signed, so I do it. It’s also usually not onerous, because most Costcos are competently run and their customers know the drill.
Walmart, I don’t even break stride. Please, touch me; I need the money. I paid for the item, I have the receipt, our business is concluded.
I live in generic 1960s/1970s era suburbia albeit nearer to commercial areas than many suburbanites do. Ref-ing Google maps …
The nearest full-sized groc store is less than 1/2 mi away, with two convenience markets between here and there. The next nearest full-sized groc store of a competing brand is 1-3/4 mi. SuperTarget is next door to that 2nd groc store while Walmart is 2-1/2 miles away. Within ~7 miles there’s 3 more Targets and 3 more Walmarts. The nearest BJs is just shy of 8 miles as is the nearest Costco but in a different direction.
There are innumerable restaurants, drug stores, banks, and miscellaneous retail of every description as far as the eye can see. Oh yeah, and a metric shitload of houses, apartments, cars, and people. Some stinking rich, some very not-rich. And every flavor in between.
This is what “normal” feels like to me. Though I sure recognize that for a lot of the USA “normal” is very different.
Sounds like your shopping options are pretty similar to mine. Which is why I was asking. I can buy food items at Wegmans or Tops. If I want to make an effort, I have other supermarket options.
But department stores? My choices are Walmart or Target (and Target, for me, is significantly less convenient). After that, I couldn’t even think of my next option since the last KMarts closed a couple of years ago. It’s not like thirty years ago when I could have gone to Ames or Caldors or Zayres or a bunch of others.
This probably is the cause of what we’re discussing. Businesses don’t have to offer better customer service when the customers don’t have an option to go to another business.