Petty of me but this is why I refuse to use self checkout. I’m not mad at the poor clerks, I’m mad at their managers.
Me too. The other day I left a full cart and walked out of a supermarket because they had just three cashier checkouts open (out of 10 or 12). The manager was studiously not looking up from her desk. I got her attention and gestured at the lines so long they were blocking cart traffic. She said that was normal and I left, which she saw.
It’s been bothering me because I hate being rude. Right now it’s hard to get workers, I realize. And og knows people are being way too nasty in public. But I couldn’t believe nobody noticed until I said something, and even then they didn’t care. What else could I have done to make the point? I hate to say it, but I think abandoning a cart in front of the manager might have been the best statement I could have made.
I hate that it came to that, I hate stores that are dismissive of customers and I hate that it brought that behavior out of me.
Yeah, I think there’s a confirmation bias thing at play or maybe attention bias or something. Once you notice people trying to coerce you, you really, really notice it and then it becomes ‘the thing’. It’s not everyone, and it’s not everywhere, but it seems like it is, once you direct your attention to it and allow it to occupy your attention.
IMO (and this is a work in progress for me), the trick seems to be not to ignore it completely, but to notice it peripherally, and then turn away. Not worth trying to spend time and effort trying to stop it - you can’t stop it - you might stop one example of it by resisting, complaining, pushing back, but you’ve only dealt with that one, independent example of the problem (and while you are doing that, you are expending time and attention on the thing); more are coming.
How is trying to convince other people to do something or think something “coercion”? People have always tried to influence other people to get what they want. It’s what human beings do. Learning how to ignore it most of the time is just basic socialization.
Why are you mad at the managers? They have zero control over that.
For that matter, my store director has zero control over it - Corporate Office tells her how many person-hours for each area of the store is permitted. The only thing the store management can do is fiddle with which particular people are on duty at any particular time, they don’t have control over how many staffed lanes will be open.
If you want to bitch about this you have to contact the Corporate Office. Of course, the company has no interest in making that access particularly easy. They say they want feedback, but what they really want is either praise/approval or for you to STFU.
Again - the manager does not control staffing. They are given X number of people at a certain point in time, that’s it. On top of that, they might be told the self-checkouts have to be fully staffed but the manned lanes not, even if every customer in the store would rather deal with a human than a self-checkout.
THEN there’s the problem of speed ratings. When I’m on a staffed lane I am expected to get people through as fast as possible. If I get too many people who need extra time (doesn’t matter if they’re fussy or 104 years old and on a walker and just can’t physically move fast) then I, the cashier, get penalized even if taking that time is better customer service.
It’s not that they don’t care, it’s that there’s nothing they can do about it. The Corporate Masters have decided that self-checkouts are the thing and staffed lanes an afterthought.
Like I said, even our store director can’t unilaterally decide to increase staffing on manned lanes.
You have to complain to the Corporate Office
Leaving your cart isn’t going to change a damn thing. Honestly, complaining to Corporate might not change a damn thing, either, but if anything will have an effect that will. Write to Corporate “Due to X I left my cart full of stuff and exited the store, you lost $$$ due to this problem” because money is the only language they really understand.
How is it not?
‘Trying to convince other people to do something or think something’ is pretty much the definition of the term ‘coerce’, once you add any kind of pressure to the equation, which is what the OP seems to be describing.
As it happens, I have the OP’s problem, but in a different domain, where the problem is even more congruent with the definition of ‘coercion’, but regardless, IMO, the solution is the same regardless and is basically triage: your undivided attention is being demanded, but you should instead ration your attention - expend just enough attention on it to be able to make the decision to turn away.
I get that. It’s just that I’m not seeing the pressure there. So people are trying to sell us stuff. So what? Fuck 'em.
Absolutely, but it’s a question of filtering the inputs because the selling (or persuasion to do whatever else) is intermingled with normal day to day interactions.
You can ignore it by ignoring everything and becoming a recluse, but that’s just exchanging one problem for another.
Not everyone finds it as straightforward to sift the wheat from the chaff as everyone else.
“if anything, people who are trusting in others are often smarter and more competent than those who are cynical about human nature.”
Please don’t abandon your full cart of groceries because 1) the cashier lines were too long and 2) you refuse to use self checkout and 3) blame customer service for not acquiescing to your will.
You went home empty handed after spending time in the store and employees have to schlep all your stuff back. That did nothing to further your cause for faster service. How much faster do you want to go through a cashier line. Why couldn’t you wait it out?
I use shop and scan. Sometimes the app crashes repeatedly and I have to go to self check out or a cashier. If it’s a cart full I don’t feel like scanning it all in again at self checkout so I join the cashier queue and wait for service.it would never occur to me to leave my cart behind to make a point about the app crashing. That’s dumb.
In a lot of ways, I feel less pressure now than I used to. It could be because as a woman of a certain age, I’m just not interesting to marketers. It’s especially true when I am watching, like, Minecraft videos or whatever. Youtube doesn’t know what to do with me, so whatever ads I see are basically irrelevant and wash through me.
I really avoid anything that feeds me anything. I read Reddit, but I don’t let it suggest things to me: I turned off the “show posts from other communities” option, so I only see things from subs I joined, and they are like, r/whatisthisplant and r/whatisthisbug, so that’s good.
I never really talked to strangers much anyway, so that’s not a huge deal. Pretty much all my friends and coworkers and network are or were public school teachers. It’s not a “selling you stuff” space.
It just seems more possible now to curate your media exposure and still have plenty to do to fill your leisure time.
But really, what it might be is that I have a really, really, really bad boss. Like, epically bad. And my rage and anger and frustration at that situation just consumes all my energy and washes out everything else. There, the pressure is insane. So maybe the world has gone to hell and I am too busy to notice.
I mean, if he left in a snit to make a point, that seems fair. If he left because the wait didn’t seem worth it to get the groceries–ignoring the sunk cost–that’s a little different.
On the other hand, if the advice works, who cares where it comes from?
I sometimes wonder what the Pharma Industry could do with all the money they spend on advertising if they used it for the betterment of humanity instead. Why tell me about Jardiance a million times a day, with an irritating jingle to boot? Just tell my doctor! It is very maddening.
I do find myself rather lost in society today. I am alone and excruciating lonely and I know that is affecting my perception of everything, but sometimes, I’m just so angry at the human race, I could just spit. Yesterday, I was driving home from work and saw a pretty tree and for some reason it made me wonder at the things we could do if we weren’t so stupid and evil and divided and greedy. It just makes me want to cry at the wasted possibilities.
I have been trying to change my input a bit though. I like the CBS Sunday Morning Show. They seem to focus on good human stories with less divisiveness. I tape it though so I can skip all the damn Pharma commercials.
Yes! How many years has this gone on? You’d think Microsoft would have abandoned Bing out of sheer embarrassment but, alas, it refuses to do so! You can add their browser, “Edge”, to the family of the unwanted. We’re a Chrome district, and Firefox is my personal browser, so Edge is the the odd man out, but not without a fight! When you switch default browsers, it’s almost whiny about it! “You sure?!!! Our browser can do whatever it is you want without switching! Pretty, pretty please stay?” Okay, maybe not quite that dramatic. LOL
The opportunity for it to go the other way is greater now than I think it probably has been for most of human history; in order for things to get in front of you, they don’t have to be useful or uplifting or informative or good for you in any way; they only need to be good at commanding attention, which gets them shared and upvoted and recommended and whatnot.
They’ll have that loophole sewn up soon enough; the opportunities to self-curate will become rarer in favour of ‘curated specially for you*’
*That is 'for you to be a more effective consumer’, not 'for you to remain a healthy individual’.
There was a lot of hype just recently about how Bing was going to completely stomp all over Google, because of the integration of ChatGPT into the searches; you’d have a lovely chat with a helpful robot that would really understand your query and just be bending over backward to help.
The reality was just a leeetle bit different from that.
OH - MY - GOD!! If I didn’t see it with my own eyes, I would never believe it! 
Thanks for that link!
Minimize your exposure to those methods of influence.
Can’t remember the last time I watched commercial TV. Most of my time on the Web is on sites that are ad-free or that I’ve paid a modest fee to experience ad-free.
Yeah, the occasional times I need to Google something, the ads will be there. So the page I was really looking for is down below five sites that are obviously the wrong ones, that paid Google to be at the top. BFD. Sure, I see ads, and I see news headlines that are intended to push my view in a given direction, but I’ve been seeing through those fnords for years. (@dougjballoon aka the NYT Pitchbot does a good job of parodying these on X/Twitter.)
Speaking of the site formerly known as Twitter, I avoid most of the junk there by never checking ‘my’ feed. I go there to read the tweets of a handful of people - if I want to read Josh Marshall’s tweets, I’ve got twitter.com/joshtpm bookmarked. Ditto for anyone else I read there semi-regularly.
There are lots of ways to avoid 90% of the shit out there even without an ad blocker, which I’ve never bothered with.
To state the obvious, not for obtuseness but for completeness - a lot of this is coming from your digital media consumption habits, to generate demand for products (or for more digital interaction) if nothing else. I’ll coin a dumb phrase: “if it streams, it screams”.
Solution: enjoy non-streaming entertainment. If you’re not a regular library patron, you’ll be astonished at what you can get for free. Books, DVDs, all sorts of stuff. The type of media that invites you to think, rather than demands it.
But yeah, what you observed is valid and it’s getting worse. Every time you scroll something, your device emits data about what you saw and how long you saw it, correlating that to where you were and what you might have been doing, to convert you into a sales opportunity. Books don’t do that.
Now if only I could take my own advice…