In the good old days every item at the grocery store had a price, the cashier would ring up your purchases quickly and out you went…not today. We have people buying items with credit cards, debit cards, personal checks, food stamps, WIC checks…can I see your drivers license ect. How many times does the scanner fail and they have to punch the code number in multiple times or they need a price check
on something because the scan was incorrect? I don’t know if it’s me but at least 50% of the time some problem develops where you wait and wait, it’s beginning to drive me crazy!! I long for the days of paying by cash.
I think you must have been a lot younger and not buying so much, then.
I too get frustrated at electronic failures and bad scans (and twits that don’t get out their cards or checkbooks until the sale has been completely rung up), however
My memory of the old days is
long waits while individual checks were cleared by some over-worked assistant manager (where did you ever go to a grocery that didn’t take checks?)
long waits while some poor kid who only understood bagging and shopping carts was sent to find the label that had fallen off a product (now it happens when the clerk can’t identify radicchio, it used to happen on the cans of tomato soup)
no purchases in any town but your own (unless you had travellers checks) because of the hassle of getting every $5.60 check examined and approved (this improved a little over time as banks spread out into their (originally 25 mile) radius from their “home” office so that you could actually go to a branch of the same bank even if you were on the far side of a metropolitan area)
no cash for the weekend if you had to work late Friday and Saturday morning (to retrieve money from a bank, you had to stand in the bank with a check in your hand–and banks had short hours so that the clerks could manually tally and reconcile their entire day’s work)
travel meant only cash or travellers checks because there was no plastic–and in some small towns the stores wouldn’t take travellers checks, so you had to be sure to get to a bank before the weekend and cash enough money to survive the whole weekend.
I get frustrated sometimes, too, but it wasn’t all rosy in the old days.
Tom~
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http://www.straightdope.com/ubb/Forum5/HTML/000448.html
“There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.”
~P.J. O’Rourke~
Ottawa (Ontario, Canada) is a bilingual city so everything must be in English and French. However, I do not read French and EVERY item on the store shelf has the French label facing out. I HATE that. Would it kill them to face out have English and half French!