I don’t always use the wipes as a matter of course, but those times I’ve grabbed a cart with some unidentifiable sticky substance on the handle, I’ve been very glad they were there!
I’d say that as long as you provide or offer to pay for the duct tape, you’re good.
If it is 6-7pm on a weeknight, if you must do your shopping right then…
do not, for the love of all that is good and holy, decide that now is the time to master the self-checkout. Especially if you cannot understand either the machine or the person who comes to help you use it.
Now this is an OP that should go viral. Seriously.
One itty bitty nitpick, though …
Some stores do allow this (none of mine do) and in some cases I think state laws even come into play. It’s called overage.
Personally I think all states should allow it. If I buy something for 75 cents at your store with a $1 coupon, you’re going to get back $1 PLUS another 8 cents (or so) handling fee when you turn it back in to the manufacturer. The coupon, however, was worth 25 cents more than the item purchased – which is not the customer’s problem. They should get the quarter back, not the store.
That said, before you lynch me – as a couponer I’m just happy to have so many stores in my area that welcome coupons and don’t treat me like a thief when I use them. I live in probably the most coupon-friendly city in the country and we have LOTS of awesome stores: Wal-Mart, Food Lion, Harris Teeter, Lowes Foods, Whole Foods, Dollar General, Family Dollar, Kroger and yes, even Piggly Wiggly. I’ve never had a cashier bat an eye or look at me as if I’m trying to put one over on the store when I show up with my binder full of coupons and end up paying about 50% less than I would have without them.
The potential for overage is rare for me anyway so even without it, I’m still coming out WAY ahead. If keeping the overage makes stores wake up and go “wow, we really should coordinate our sales with coupons, the crazy coupon people show up in droves and throw money at us!” then everyone wins.
Just trying to 'splain the other side’s position, that’s all.
A little nitpick on your nitpick. I currently work part time in a grocery store and, while it’s true that they get back the value of the coupon plus a handling fee from the manufacturer, it is somewhat difficult to get the manufacturer to honor their coupons. The owner of the store told me that they are lucky to get 50% of the coupons redeemed from the manufacturer. They continue to take them though as it is good for getting and retaining customers.
And don’t bring your cart full of crap to the self-checkout. Self-checkout should be for people who have only a few items.
No offense, but if you use “coupon” as a verb, I probably don’t want to be behind you in line. Just sayin’.
Then you need to have another plan for getting the cart to the corral, where it belongs. If you can’t do that, then you need to find some other way to get your groceries.
Amen to figuring out whether you have money before you get to the register. I have actually seen the genesis of the next generation of incompetent shoppers:
Once, when I was working retail, a customer came in with the intention of teaching his two young daughters about shopping and money management (he explained this as they were checking out). They were picking out and buying stuff with their own money. Great so far, and he’s even thought to do it during a relatively slow period. BUT! Instead of teaching the girls to figure out what they could afford, he’d just given them each a basket and let them run wild. Each girl had a small basket (the kind you carry) filled with $50+ worth of stuff. Each of them had under $15 in saved allowance money (which I found out AFTER I’d rung everything else up). And between their shaky math skills and the fact that in their minds, everything in the basket already belonged to them, it was an extremely arduous process of taking items off the bill, ooh now I have enough to put something else back on, oh wait I didn’t know about tax, etc. etc. kill me now. And even better, the “slow time” that dad had picked to do this was 20 minutes before closing, so there was only one till left in the store, and the other customers had to sit in line behind him and wait (and he was a dick to them when they asked if they could go ahead with their single aspirin purchase, and my manager wouldn’t even leave the office to try to help me). Fun night.
Agreed. I think there should be a separate register for people who have more than three coupons.
Self-checkout story - we went to our local Superstore on New Year’s Day to pick up something or other*, and it was incredibly crowded - like, no one can move in the area with the tills because it was so crowded. We waited in line for half an hour at the self-checkout line. When I went back to that store the next week, they had brand new signs at the self-checkouts, proclaiming that they were for small amount of groceries only (I think it was 25 items, which still seems high for self-checkout to me).
*I don’t frigging know what the hell we were doing at the store that day. I learned my lesson, though.
I absolutely love self-checkout, unfortunately there is only one store around here that has it and that’s Walmart. It is kind of slow though as I’m usually waiting for it to get it’s ass in gear and do something. It doesn’t seem to have an override for the voice command thing.
In line with the OP, please don’t give me a mile long piece of paper along with the receipt to tell me to go online and take a stupid survey, just give me my damn receipt.
Coupons ain’t the problem - they ought to ring up just like groceries. The problem is people who want to do six or seven transactions to make the coupons worth more, or who can’t read the stupid things to find out exactly what they work for, or that sort of thing. Just coupons isn’t a problem at all.
I love the self checkout too, mostly because they seem to be rarely used at the store I go to, or at least they are generally empty when I shop. Then again, I have the luxury of avoiding the busy hours. I usually go 1st thing on a weekday morning (8 am-ish) after my workout class, or around 11 am or so. Few people, no shrieking kids, the occasional restocking cart but that’s it.
I’m also fast with the self-check, I have it down to a system, and I don’t dither with coupons and checks and whatnot. I end up having to wait for it to catch up sometimes, when the voice insists on telling me to place each item in the bag.
I confess I’m occasionally guilty of obliviotness. I’m a label reader, so I’ll stand and read and compare stuff if the store isn’t too busy, and now and again I find myself as the idjit with her cart in the way. I, however, do move it promptly and with profuse apologies and a smile, which seems to startle people. I’ll also park it in what I hope is an out of the way spot, in front of something that’s not usually a big seller, and walk up a bit to stare at the soups or see what meat’s on sale or something. If I get stuck shopping when it’s crowded or if there’s a lot of restocking going on I’ll park the cart at the end of each aisle and just walk up to grab what I need. Much faster than negotiating between yakkers and stockers and oblivious people with too many kids tagging along.
i have a decade of experience working in retail grocery, so i definitely enjoyed the OP. spot on. just had a couple things to add:
re older folks avoiding the grocery during lunch hour- i agree with the idea behind it, which is basically just to think of other people. it’s the same principle that keeps me from going to a restaurant at the last minute and ordering a complicated dish, or going into a store just before closing and taking my time leaving.
in practice, though, it’s not always that easy. older folks are often dependent on others to get to and from the store, whether a relative or friend takes them, or they catch a bus, or whatever. i can’t blame them for not restricting their shopping to slower times when it can be a struggle to just get there and back.
i have to agree anyone who self describes as a couponer is no one i want near me when i’m trying to check out. i buy things on sale, and if i see a coupon for something i’m buying i’ll definitely grab it. if people want to clip coupons on sunday for items they buy frequently, that’s cool. but i really cannot ever imagine myself happily holding up a line (by the way, not implying PandaBear77 does this, just an observation about some couponers i’ve seen in action) because i have so many goddamn coupons someone has to put in an override for each one, while i cheerfully chat with my companion about how the store gets credit for all these and how i’ll never have to buy toothpaste again, ignoring the glares of the line behind me which is now 6 people deep. good fucking god.
it never seems to be people who are hurting financially who do this, either, just idle housewives who get off on buying a year’s supply of paper towels for $3 or whatever.
My nearest supermarket has really narrow aisles that are often crowded with staff shelf-stacking, so everyone has to walk single file even without trolleys (carts). This means that I get the joy of combining two recent Pit threads being stuck behind a slow walker in a supermarket.
Now this, I didn’t know.
I wonder why they won’t honor them? Is there some kind of a deadline that the stores have to meet in order to get reimbursed?
I’m sure there is a deadline, but I doubt many stores go over it if they want to get their money back.
It’s the same way with what they call ‘reclamation’, which means getting reimbursed for damaged merchandise, she said only about half of that gets refunded also.
[QUOTE=Thudlow Boink]
If closing is at 10:00 pm, that’s when they Release The Hounds, right? I don’t want to be in the store when that happens!
[/QUOTE]
I’ve worked retail and I totally hate it when people come in at the last minute and want to shop for half an hour, or even worse when they just want to browse.
The worst example of this that happened to me was when I was a cashier at a sporting goods store many years ago. Normally if we closed at 9pm, then we’d usually have the last customer rung through by 9:05. Then the process of closing the tills and reconciling everything in the back room (and all the tills had to be closed to run the final reports on the computer). This would take about 30 minutes, so we’d actually be done by 9:30-9:40. Occasionally we might be done at 9:20 on a slow day, or 9:45 on a really busy day. The store only paid us until 9:30 (I don’t know if this was legal, but it averaged out so I never fought it).
So one time it was 8:45 and this family of five comes in and they all want to buy downhill skiis, so the department manager (who would be making a big commission on such a large purchase) told we needed to keep the till open, and he was sure they wouldn’t take too long. I’m sure you can see where this is going - the family farted around trying on a million pairs of ski boots, couldn’t decide what brand they wanted, debated how much they wanted to spend, blah blah blah. So it’s 9:35 and they still haven’t decided on anything and the rest of the store is closed except the cash register, and the family decides to leave. They’ll come back tomorrow they say, when they’ve slept on it. But I was working the next day and I know they didn’t come back.
On the other hand - although I totally understand how stores want to close on time and the employees deserve to leave on time, some stores can be a little over-zealous in this area. A couple years ago it was Thanksgiving and I was headed over to my parents house and they called and asked if I could pick up whipping cream on my way over. I stopped at 7-11 (since they’re open 24 hours), but they were out of stock. So I stopped at a grocery store that is normally open until 11pm, but was closing at 5pm due to the holiday. I pulled into the parking lot at 4:49, so I figured it would be fine. I get to the door at 4:50 and there’s an employee basically blockading the door with stacks of shopping baskets - they didn’t just lock the door and put up a sign, he’s actually stacked a million baskets in front of the door and standing there telling me they’re closed. I explained that I understood they want to close on time in ten minutes, but I swear that I only need to get whipping cream and it will take me a maximum of two minutes. He gives me the hairy eyeball and looks dubious, and I promise I’m not lying and I won’t try to buy a bunch of stuff or take too long. So he let me in, I grabbed some whipping cream and went to the express checkout (which had no one in line), and I was back in my car and pulling out of the lot at 4:57.
This rant is why I am afraid to apply at Meijer. Super store mutant mart.
I confess to leaving my empty chocolate dipped cookie cup on an emptyish shelf last week. no excuse I know.
Another me too, I recently I had the wonderful opportunity of catching a couple in the act of cart carelessness. I sweetly yet loudly told him where the corral was, he abided my wishes too!
but then I had to return home (9 miles) because I forgot my damn money at home. :smack:
3rd shift stocking might be ok, but its 24/7,small town hoods look for excitement in their parkng lots. I might have to carry a wrench on my person…