I take it that your time is obviously that important, because you can’t wait? Much more important than mine plus the 3-4 other shoppers who could have been checked out during the time that you were plugging up the express lane? All righty, then.
But no worries. I’ll just scamper over to the self-checkout lane and have my items bagged and paid for long before you’re finished.
Where are you guys shopping with such slow checkers that that’s a problem? At the Aldi supermarket I go to the stuff is all scanned and in the cart before I can finish unloading mine. It must be the bagging that slows down the works.
When did you start the clock? Most of the waiting is on the people ahead of us in the line. It’ not that the cashier is slow, it’s that there are six people ahead who need to have their stuff scanned, bagged, and paid for before I can even unload my stuff.
Are there no lines at your Aldi?
I don’t mind folks using their phones while shopping. I do mind when they are so locked into their phones they are crashing into other people whether the crashing is occurring in the aisle or the parking lot.
I’ve got a couple customers who do that do they can hang the bag off their walker or a wheelchair handle, or who are post-stroke and find it easier to carry that way due to impaired dexterity or hand strength.
Why able-bodied young adults do that I don’t know.
Or part-time cashiers - we have two of our cashiers who only work for us 20 hours a week and work for one of those services during some days they aren’t scheduled with us. Initially there was some concern about conflict of interest but HR said it was OK as long as it was for a day they weren’t scheduled to work for us, and the shopping app said the same thing so everyone is OK with it.
Today’s trip was even better! But for some reason I spaced out at the register and needed assistance from the cashier concierge. Then I swear she was a little snippy pointing out the bright red pay now button to me. Lol I’m catching on -
leaving I still felt somewhat criminal like I was skipping out. So delicious!
Not that I’ve noticed. Because the checkers are so fast they never build up. Sometimes one or two people ahead, but the whole process only takes a couple of minutes. Aldi checkers don’t bag, they scan and put the items in a cart. I usually wheel the cart out to the lot and bag as I load the stuff into the trunk, although they have a bagging shelf for people who prefer to bag indoors.
Okay, I was a little off on the milk situation at the commissary. Like I said, I never buy milk. So, I’m never over there looking at it. Today, I went over to the milk isle to look at it. There aren’t any plastic 1 gallon containers. They’re all sold in 1/2 gallon cartons.
Because it’s easier to carry a plastic bag by its handles.
People can get better jobs. Some of those jobs involve the upkeep of the computers and tech. Of course many people aren’t cut out for that. If not, we need UBI or (insert your idea for a program or whatever public policy will help deal with the mass loss of obsolete jobs). This is something we’ve dealt with for all of time and is only going to worse. My mother’s job doesn’t exist anymore. Her dad’s professional job doesn’t exist anymore. Low wage low tech jobs don’t really need to exist much longer. Pretending doesn’t help.
I’d say there are more employees in the grocery store now than there used to be. Fewer are bagging groceries and walking customers to their cars, but more are actually shopping for curbside service.
The way i see it, when I was a kid, there was one way to shop: walk around the aisles, load up a cart, and stand in line where a cashier rang you up and a bagger put your groceries in paper bags. As time went on, they came up with the more flexible plastic bag and the express lines for fewer items. Now you have even more choices. You can do your own scanning and bagging. You can order ahead of time and have your groceries already bagged and paid for when you get there. I know lots of people who use the curbside services so they don’t have to take their small kids to the grocery store. I have considered it because I think the five to ten dollars charge for the service would be offset by the cost of an hour of my time and the fact that there would be no impulse buys.
Most of the people i see bagging groceries are teens or older people supplementing their retirement. Between the store’s curbside service and the third party shop and deliver services like Couch Potato, Favor, Amazon, etc., there are lots of opportunities for part time and flexible hour employees than before. Retirees, mothers with children in school, students with weird schedules: these services are providing employment opportunities that weren’t there before. And while I wouldn’t want to pay for my groceries to be chosen, bagged, and delivered on a regular basis, I can see there is a market for this service. I would like to be organized enough that i could plan my meals and do my shopping on line and pick up curbside. That’s a whole hour or more of my weekend I could have for me instead of fighting the crowds.
Embrace the idea of choices.
Er… no.
I was talking about people who bag items with handles and why, then finished up with “I don’t know why able-bodied young adults bag items with handles” because some do despite, as you claiming, it’s easier to use the handles.
For some reason, almost all my East Indian customers bag the milk gallons. They want everything in a bag. Petit women also often want it bagged - I suspect a combination of the handles not really being designed for hands their size along with a poor grip strength. Someone with small hands will not be able to grasp more than one gallon milk jug at a time, their fingers just aren’t long enough to wrap around two handles, so maybe they can carry more if the jugs are bagged and slung over their arm.
But why there are young men who want it bagged? I dunno. Maybe it’s because that’s what their mom did?
If the customer wants it in a bag that’s what they get - I’m not there to argue with them, I’m there to ring up and bag their stuff in a manner that makes them happy.
And quite often they get worse jobs, or at least lower-paying ones. I used to make twice as much as I do now. This is the best I’ve gotten since the Great Recession, that was 12 years ago. Saying “people can get better jobs” is just a way to make economic disruption look pretty. Very few of them are going to get “better” jobs. The lucky ones will do as well as before and most will not be doing as well as they were, particularly if they’re past about 35 because at that point it gets a LOT harder to find a re-training program that will accept you or an industry open to letting you start over. Sure, you can go back to school - but if you’re unemployed how the frack are you going to pay for it? Loans? Hey, you have to pay those back and that WILL eat into your monthly budget for a long time, leaving you less net than you had before. Worse yet if you haven’t paid off the loans from the education that got you the job you had when you were rendered obsolete.
Which is not to say it’s impossible - my job/career has been eliminated through technology twice in my lifetime already. But it sucks. It really really sucks even when you have an employed partner to help you out, no kids to worry about, no debt, and some smarts to use. Meanwhile, you have people treating you like shit because you’re making use of what little social support system we have (which you have paid into for a decade or two so it’s not like you haven’t contributed or earned a place in society). Yeah, great.
Yes, jobs are going to change, but we could be a whole lot better in how we treat people affected by such technological shifts. Here in the US we treat people really, really shitty when they’re in that situation. Maybe people wouldn’t worry so much about human beings losing jobs or careers if we didn’t treat the unemployed like walking pieces of garbage or the poor like criminals for simply being poor.