People upthread were talking about price labels attached to the item.
The price label comments started with Really_Not_All_That_Bright’s comment which didn’t specify ‘attached to the item’, I responded to it, and Ynnad responded to me adding the qualifier ‘price tag affixed to the item’ and we talked about it a bit. The original context in which they were discussed was just about them being printed, not about tags specifically attached to the items.
I meant to mention in my prior response that I find it interesting that none of bob_2’s supermarkets have items packaged onsite and often charged by the pound like raw meat, deli meat, bread, cakes, pre-cut fruit/vegetables, premade sandwiches/salads/etc, and the like. Also they like to slap discount labels on things that are on clearance, close to expiration, or damaged in some way. While it’s common (but not universal) for manufactured stuff that has a barcode on the package to only have a shelf label, I would be surprised to go to a supermarket where things like meat and bakery items don’t ever have a lable directly attached.
Yes, some meat products have individual product labels, because they’re sold by weight and the weight varies.
We do have fresh foods section where items are weighed instore. The price per kilo or 100 grams is on the shelf edge or on a flag in the display. After weighing the scale prints a label with a barcode which can be scanned. Fish, deli and meat are weighed by the assistants, but we have to weigh our own fruit and veg (although much of that is prepacked). It is not unknown for dishonest people who are self scanning to weigh something expensive but tell the scale that it is cheap carrots.
We had an interesting thread a few years ago on this exact point.
Where somebody came in and said it was completely moral and ethical to buy $20/lb expensive meat and self-scan it as $0.10/lb potatoes. After all, the store was making you do their work, and so they bear all risk of the work’s accuracy. If it mattered to them, they’d have some kind of quality control = oversight. They don’t, so you don’t have to.
Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t the consensus POV, but this person seemed totally serious. It takes all kinds of scoundrel to make a population.
Dishonesty aside, some people do get really worked up about self scanning. “You’re putting people out of work; why should I do it, ‘they’ should employ people.”
I find it more convenient. I can keep track of the total in my basket; I always know what each item costs, and best of all, I only have to handle it once and I can pack it how I like it to be packed.
When I only have a couple items I prefer self-checkout. When I have more, I prefer cashiers if the wait is the same. I don’t purposely wait for a cashier like I used to several years ago during Pleaseplaceiteminbaggingareaunexpectediteminbaggingareagate.
I still get that nonsense (“Unexpected item in bagging area” or “Please place item in bagging area”) but I find if you ignore it eventually settles down.
I’m too tall and too old for self-checkout. If they wanted me to use self-checkout, they would have made a bagging area I could reach without bending over.
The UK has the opposite problem - too many coins!
The Royal Mint has no plans to mint any new £2 or 2p coins for the next decade, as its stockpile of coins remains high amid falling cash usage in the UK.
When the pound coins were changed from round to dodecahedron, people searched their houses and handed in their old coins, including stashes of other coins lying around, so the banks have 10x as many coins than they need.
Nitpick on this: The European Central Bank doesn’t mint euro coins; the Member States do. The process is as follows: The ECB sets an overall aggregate amount of euro coins to be coined. This amount is allocated to the individual Member States on the basis of quotas that, roughly, correspond to the relative sizes of their economy. The treasuries of these Member States then produce the coins in their responsibility and issue them, at face value, through their banking systems (meaning they collect seigniorage revenue in the form of the face value of teh coins they circulate). The process is very different from banknotes, which are printed and circulated by central banks rather than treasuries, and which show up as a liability on the central bank balance sheet. The process was set up that way because (1) the treasuries wanted to collect the seigniorage, and (2) there is a strong historical tradition in Europe that making coins is a sovereign prerogative of states (hence the protraits of monarchs on the coins), which is less pronounced in the case of banknotes, where the historical development was different.
Conceptually, the ECB can still steer the overall amount of coins that it approves for coining, but here the process gets political, as any attempts to reduce that amount would collide with the interest of the Member States in making more of them.
I visited there in early 1978 and remember receiving in change small “banknotes” for 50 or 100 lire, issued from commercial banks. Some of them had an endorsement on the back, though fortunately it wasn’t the case that everyone who ever held it had to add their own endorsements . Visually they were a hybrid between personal checks and government printed currency.
Our family was vacationing in Italy a lot in the 1980s and early 1990s. I remember that too; you would often get tokens for public payphones, or even candy, in lieu for small change.
I visited Italy in 1987, and remember sometimes getting little sweets like M&Ms or skittles in change for odd lira. Mostly, though, they just rounded up the change to the nearest hundred.