Well, on the bright side, he’s at least feeding his kid baby formula.
(He sounds like the type that’d warm up some milk… or he’d put the kid on the floor with the other pets eating mushy food.)
Or reselling baby formula.
Our society needs to embrace public humiliation like we used to.
Bring back the stocks.
People who are actually feeding a kid formula buy just one type of formula. This guy put all of it in his cart. Not just one type. All of them.
Either he was caring for a dozen of infants and toddlers or he was planning to resell them for profit. The latter being more likely.
So, profiteering amounting to extortion on desperate parents? I dearly hope he hasn’t passed on his genes.
That was my first thought. Toilet paper in 2020, baby formula in 2022.
And Cheerios in 2023… you heard it here first!
Also my first thought. Minus the part about caring for many infants.
Because I keep getting coupons for Cheerios I now have an embarrassingly large stash of the cereal. This may slot in with my serendipitous bulk purchase of toilet paper in December 2019. No, I can’t actually foresee the future - if I did I’d be playing the stockmarket/casinos/ponies - but occasionally I get a bit of positive thrown my way.
My first day back at work since my wife died. We had no clerk issuing tools and parts today, and some long stretches of time where the machine I was babysitting was not processing mail.
Many years ago, my then supervisor had the idea that on shifts when no T&P clerk was working, it might be helpful to have one of the ETs cover any calls that came in to T&P. After seeing that I was willing, he arranged for me to have access to the room, and showed me the ropes (looking up part locations, retrieving parts, writing work orders, issuing and receiving radios; a few basic functions, so a broken belt or something wouldn’t shut a system down until the next shift). I’ve been able to step up to the plate on this for the past ten or so years.
So this evening, a call came in and I responded. The worker at the counter wanted to check out a key. He gave me the number, I got the key for him, and had him sign it out. Then I went back to my machine, which was about to start again.
Twenty minutes later, my (current) supervisor came storming up to me, demanding to know why I had issued a floor-buffing machine to a clerk! I didn’t issue a buffer to anyone, I issued a key, number 181, like he asked (says I). Supervisor brings me to Tools and Parts, shows me which equipment key 181 will start, and tells me that the clerk wanted the key to get into ROOM 181, not KEY 181. First he tells me that the guy is a clerk (like I should know that), he doesn’t use the floor buffer, and that I shouldn’t let a clerk check out a buffer, furthermore, I’m not to issue keys to ANYONE anymore. Okay, I won’t, says I. Then he says he’s going to have my access to Tools and Parts rescinded.
Whatever, dude. We usually have a T&P clerk on Sundays (the day we don’t have a supervisor on my shift), so at this point the only reason for me to have access is to save HIM the need to do those tasks on Saturdays when there isn’t. Okay, minor screwup is on me, but it isn’t like the clerk went joyriding on the floor buffer; he just went to the supervisor to get the right key. But my supervisor acted like I’d done irreparable damage to national security, like handing nuclear secrets to the Russians, or voting for a Republican. 
Wow. Glad I was never treated that way by a supervisor. You handled it well. I might have said something that cost me my job.
Also, sorry for your loss.
For about an hour and a half yesterday our store’s computer system went haywire and we could only accept cash or checks for transactions, no plastic.
Oh. My. God. The way some people reacted you’d think it was the apocalypse.
About 20 minutes later the store’s ATM ran out of money to dispense. That was also “fun”. Also, I think I learned some new swear words from customers.
Kind of glad I won’t have to work in the cash office today, I’m sure yesterday’s interesting events will generate some chaos there. Not so much the sheer quantity of cash - that’s a trivial thing, to handle a greater volume that we’d normally do on a day (around here that’s called “Christmas Eve”) - but all the interrupted and cancelled transactions should be “fun”.
Yeah, we’ve had this happen many times. No matter how many signs you put up and how many announcements you make, not only will people rock up to the cashier with 30 items and a debit card, they will ignore the cashier telling them we cannot accept cards and wait until the 30 items are rung up to be “surprised” that we can’t take their card.
No ma’am, we are not going to break out those carbonless firms and that sliding screeching machine you remember from 40 years ago.
My debit card wouldn’t even work in one of those, since the numbers are not raised.
Yep - the lack of raised numbers on a lot (most?) cards these days means the old machines with the carbon forms are no longer an option. Although in cleaning the cash office a couple years ago we did come across several bundles of the old forms, still wrapped in their packaging. Have no idea where the machine(s) to use them are, if we even still have them.
Yesterday’s cash office person said we had more cash in the office than even the day before Christmas. It’s my turn in the cave today so I’ll be interested in seeing the size of the cash deposit.
She also said the biggest problems weren’t in the regular lanes - apparently the drawers balanced out even better than usual there, to the credit of us working as cashiers - but with the self-serves, the service desk, and lots of problems with checks. Our usual check-users have the system down, but yesterday a lot of people who don’t usually use checks were doing so, and some of our cashiers aren’t very comfortable processing checks but the supervisors weren’t as free to help them so it seems where were plenty of problems.
I’m expecting that despite the influx of cash the store still suffered some losses due to the disruption, both from business that went elsewhere and the above problems. I’m just glad I didn’t have to document all that and fill out the paperwork.
The machines used to imprint the credit card on the copies were just for convenience, weren’t they? I always thought the merchant could still complete the credit card slip by hand if need be. Is that not the case?
It’s evidence that the card was physically there. This was before any amateur could 3-d print up something like the physical card very easily.
And yet, I think I recall occasionally seeing one of those old credit slips being hand-written. I think the merchant(s) would occasionally say their imprint mochine was broken, so they wrote the slips by hand.
I think it would only have been questioned if for some reason the charge was questioned, in which case, at worst, the merchant might be on the hook for the amount of the charge. So merchants could hand-write a slip at their discretion.
We’re having a big interdepartmental meeting this morning, and it is time for all of our computers to restart to install updates. 
(except for mine, because I’m special)
When our corporate IT pushes out updates, it gives you a notice that your PC needs to be rebooted in 8 hours or it will auto-reboot. For some reason a few years ago it got cut back from 8 hours to something like 10-15 minutes. Which sucked if you were in the middle of something and had to scramble to save before your PC shut down. I remember one time corporate HR was doing some dog and pony show for the staff (probably the annual health care enrollment presentation) and about halfway through the hour long meeting, the “reboot” notice popped up on the laptop they were using for the slideshow. So they had to hurry up and get through the presentation before the laptop rebooted. 
It’s back to eight hours now so someone must have come to their senses (or enough of upper mgmt complained).