Again, based on my experience this is NOT what most of my customers want. It’s what you want. If that’s all you want I have no problem with giving you minimal contact, but a lot of other customers want more than that and they are just as entitled to get what they want as you are to get what you want.
As I said - communicate. If you don’t want to be chatty and it looks like your cashier does say something because she/he is not a mind reader and has to accommodate everyone. “I just want to get my stuff and get out of here.” would work just fine. “I don’t feel like talking” “Grunt. Grunt. Grunt.” (yeah, I can take a hint).
Admittedly, the technology is not what we would like it to be. I run a pretty sophisticated cashier register 8 hours a day, but I still have my struggles with self-checkouts.
Unless it’s actually required by law, such as not selling alcohol to minors, or certain drug restrictions, it’s simply none of your business who is buying what, in whatever quantity, for whatever reason they may have.
I would pay good money if the cashier asked the “having a party” question when I am buying three bottles of Mazola oil, two large boxes of condoms, and a dozen cucumbers.
Not that it’s your fault, or you have any ability to fix it, but one thing about the selfcheckout system at Stop&Shops drives me nutty.
The stickers on cantaloupe’s have their bar codes in two rows, and neither the hand scanners or the station scanners can read them. Strike one, but I’ll live with it.
So instead you go to “look up chart.” Cantaloupe is under ‘C’, right? Nope. Okay, let’s try under ‘M’ == aha, here’s melons. Let’s see, Melon, Honeydew; Melon, Crenshaw; Melon, four or five other types … nope, no Melon, Cantaloupe. So where the hell is it? Ask the Helper Guy who’s trying to manage six different stations. Oh, it’s under ‘M’ all right, but on an entirely different page, after about ten other M items following the Melon group, there’s Melon, Cantaloupe. Gee, why didn’t you think to look there?
Why the hell can’t they have listed all the melons in one group???
Why the hell couldn’t they at least have them in alphabetical order??
And most aggravating
Why the hell couldn’t they list them under BOTH cantaloupe and melon, cantaloupe??? Like the computer cares if the list is a few items longer.
This won’t work in every situation, but if the system gives you the option of entering a 4-digit code the one for cantaloupe is 4050. All the fruits and vegetables have a four-digit code. These are PLU’s or “price look up” codes.
I got bad news for you - almost any store you walk into these days will tape your transaction. If you pay with anything other than cash you leave a trail and record behind. Your transactions are not private regardless of whether the cashier speaks to you or not.
Neither of those things are the same as an annoying cashier trying to make small talk by grilling you about your purchases.
The Food Network’s Sunny Anderson has an occasional segment on The Kitchen called “Nunya Business”. All busybodies should follow that excellent advice.
You know, I keep forgetting you actually can just type in the code. :smack:
I still say they should list all items multiple times if people commonly know them by multiple names. Why should I have to guess if that is a “squash, green” or a “zucchini”?
Next time a cashier gets to chatty or whatever, look that person in the eye and say “I prefer no small talk. Please just ring my stuff up so I can be on my way.”
Most of the time this will work. If it doesn’t, then speak to the manager because the cashier is supposed to accommodate your needs to the extent possible. STFU is certainly a reasonable thing to do.
Because the people designing these systems have never actually been in the front lines using them, or trying to use them, and I suspect they might not even do their own grocery shopping.
I could name a half dozen “features” of my station at work that are actually impediments to commerce, poor design, and user unfriendly. Not to mention the problems generated for anyone NOT a typical height adult human being.
Case in point: our newest screen dialogue for chipped cards indicates the use of either red or green buttons. The problem is that the colors chosen are, apparently, in the range that causes problems for people with protanopia and deuteranopia forms of colorblindness. This affects a noticeable, even if small, percentage of our male customers (so far I have not encountered any women with such problems, and people with deuteranomaly are not affected, at least I’m not). Yes, the buttons ALSO have distinctive symbols on them but this is not mentioned in the software dialogue. At my station, where I can tell someone that “The O is the green and the X is the red” this is not a problem. It IS a problem at the self-serve lanes. This problem could have easily been remedied from the get-go with a little thought but it wasn’t.
I could add more issues but won’t unless asked. We’ve already strayed pretty far from the original topic.
I don’t think anyone has commented on the other part of the OP - that homeless people tend to be thin. A very high proportion of homeless people, at least street homeless rather than constantly couch-surfing, have drug problems and mental health issues. It’s the drugs that make them thin, though not in a good way.
When my Mom was older I’d take her to the store, and we had to get in the line for “her” cashier, and at least twice I had to fend off the manager that was trying to move us to the shorter or no-line checkout. It was usually only a few words, but that cashier brightened my Mom’s day every time she went to the store.
On the user interface design…just so you know: I have had knock-down-drag-out screaming matches trying to get management to let me make mine better…“That isn’t what the spec calls for…”
And even if the programmer has no real life experience, surely it would be reasonable to have it tested out by some, you know, real life actual people??
Oh, please do.
As to the OP’s question, SciFiSam has it right. The relative lack of ‘fat poor men’ is very likely due to drug/mental health/alcohol problems coupled with the fact that our society makes more efforts to take care of women than men because, no doubt, of lingering ideas of women being naturally more helpless and in need of protection. Our ‘safety net’ isn’t all that good, but there’s still a lot more aimed at women (particularly women with children) than there is for men.