And I’d bet that these are the exceptions. Plenty of OTC meds, you can get either in blister packs or in bottles. For instance, Prilosec and its generic equivalent. AFAICT, you can only get Prilosec in the blister packs, but you can get the generic stuff either way.
My wife’s the one who uses the Prilosec, and she’s firmly of the opinion that blister packs are of the devil. It’s been probably a decade or so since the last time I needed a med that came in a blister pack, so I have no opinion one way or the other.
Apples are often a troublesome item for checkers, especially before the little stickers, because seemingly every year there’s a different “trendy” cultivar, and it’s usually nearly identical to whatever the trendy apple was last year. Luckily, most apples tend to be the same price so if you get it wrong, you haven’t messed anything up too badly.
My understanding is that they put Tylenol in blister packs in the UK to discourage suicides, and it works: the extra effort of cutting or punching out 50 pills discourages impulsive overdoses.
Around here, Woolworths supermarkets mostly have weight sensors in the bagging areas turned off, because of the amount of problems they cause. My local store turned them back on, because they were getting too much shoplifting. A week later, they turned them off again. Just too much hassle.
I’d expect that a lot of cheating (i.e., shoplifting) occurs at the self checkouts. I wonder if the supermarkets have determined just how much occurs, compared that to the savings from not having to hire more cashiers and decided that it’s cheaper.
