At my store every couple months they move all that equipment in order to do floor maintenance and repairs. Product that has been under the shelves for months is sent off to damage and salvage so eventually it’s accounted for.
Some shrink just simply disappears. Particularly in the produce department it can disappear into toddlers, although a certain subset of adults seem to think snacking without paying is somehow OK.
Thank you!
For the record, I’m in the U.S. and never use the things. In my family, we call them “idiot sticks.” I’d have to work really hard to think up a more unnecessary product.
In my 50 years of experience, none of that is true.
It’s really not that hard to notice if the cashier is about to grab someone else’s item and say, “That’s not mine,” which takes less than two seconds.
I just saw LSLGUY’s message about this, sorry for being late to the divider party!
When i opened my very first grocery store, i had a few dividers that we used. They worked well for about a month and were either stolen or lost. I never bothered to replace them, because we found we didn’t really need them.
The same effect can be achieved by placing a basket between orders, having a large space between orders, or even just the cashier being able to tell where the order stops and starts.
As to the question why these are manufactured, i think my first couple sentences summed it up. They get lost surprisingly easy, and i imagine a large store that wants to use them, orders them pretty frequently. Besides that, i doubt there is a manufacturer that only makes these dividers, the dividers are probably left overs from manufacturing similar plastic pieces.
Potato discount?
At the “local” “super” grocery stores here, called Meijer, they wanted to do the self check outs, they found a lot of stock loss going to the bottom of the cart items not being scanned by the customer so they moved to the ONLY 12 items or less self check outs…for a while they tried to get the store helper cashier to go around and scan the items for customers underneath the cart just so they knew they got all of them but mostly just 12 or less aisles now…at least at the Meijer stores I go to.
I like bagging my own groceries, I have a few oversize grocery bags I like to pack myself. Most cashiers have no freaking idea how to pack the bags except for the eggs not being on top. They have no idea that bread gets squashed easily! So I pack my bags to my liking and now, that’s gone. I rarely get out of there with less than 12 items!
Idiot sticks, uppity much? :p:p
If youre digging thru your purse looking for your choice of payment its easy to not notice them screwing up your order! Bad enough if you dont notice one bag that did not get loaded in your cart! :dubious:
I’m surprised you’re not being offered them by people wanting to advertise their products.
I know someone who collects them, He’s been everywhere and has about 200. He especially wants the advertising ones. He is basically a thief, I guess!
Yeah, I’d say so. Still, I had a boyfriend in H.S. (otherwise a great kid) who loved to boost the trays from fast food restaurants and cafeterias. 
He had quite the collection.
I accidentally drove off with a sonic tray one time. You know they used to hang them on your window. I kept it for years. I wonder what happened to that thing. Hmmm…
My aunt used to have a drive in theater speaker that she didn’t mean to take.
Shopper at the self-serve checkout puts their pile of $7/lb organic kale on the produce scale and carefully types in the code for $0.25/lb white potatos. The computer rings up 2.5 lbs at $0.25/lb = $0.62 and is totally satisfied when 2.5 lbs of kale worth $17.50 drops into the shopper’s bag on the output scale.