Because it’s a perfectly valid construction, no different from What’s it near? or What’s it next to?
There’s nothing for you to wince at. Nothing to correct.
Hearing this used in context, adding “at” to the end of the sentence is not arbitrary. It implies that you aren’t simply requesting info, but you are seeking the location for a specific purpose.
If someone asks me, “Where are the scissors,” they may be just curious or they may need them. It’s ambiguous. Maybe they just want to be sure that they are put away in their proper place for safety, or can be accounted for in the near future. If they say, “Where are the scissors at,” it is implied that they are seeking the scissors for urgent use.
I think of it like adding “very” as a vague adjective. It’s subjective but not meaningless.
Agreed. I think that is in line with my Palace of Westminster example above. If someone asks “Where is that?” it is a more general question, really just for conversation or knowledge, not for some immediate useful purpose.
If someone asks “Where is that at?” then I would think that they have some semi-urgent purpose for a more definition location as they may be planning a trip soon.
Similar to your scissors example, if someone asked “Where are the scissors?” I would probably say “in the kitchen.” If they asked “Where are the scissors at?” I would probably say, “in the kitchen, drawers by the stove, third drawer down, probably underneath the 50 ketchup packets.”
I was taught that ending a sentence with a preposition was an indication of lack of intelligence for not using proper grammar, by an elementary school English teacher.
Whenever students would forget and ask “Where is this thing at?” etc. She would respond “between the A and the T.”
For whatever reason it made an impression on me.
Used to be a lot of that bullshit flying around back in the day. Not so much now, at least not that I’ve seen recently.
I was taught the same thing and so were many others, including apparently the OP. Because of that, many people look down on those who end sentences with prepositions. As a result, people who want to succeed in business or in other public ventures know this, and refrain from ending their sentences with prepositions. People who do not run the risk of being looked down upon because they do not conform their style to this social convention. It is self-propagating.
This is the case even if it is technically correct to end a sentence with a preposition.
“Ain’t it hard when you discover that
He really wasn’t Where It’s At…”
-R. Zimmerman
I think it was Tom Paxton who wrote that “where it’s at” means “rich”. Meanwhile, we have temporal displacement.
“Where is it from?” ==> looking back.
“Where is it going?” ==> looking forward.
“Where is it at?” ==> looking right now.
“Is it where it’s at?” ==> so retro!
I feel like the “don’t end a sentence with a preposition” superstition is fading, thankfully. Same with split infinitives. It’s taken a long time, but we’re finally getting there. (Hell, H.W. Fowler, a grammarian’s grammarian if there ever was one, dismissed it as a “cherished superstition” back in freaking 1925. And almost a hundred years later, there are still some folk who cleave to this silly “rule,” but, thankfully, they are becoming a minority.)
I didn’t interpret the OP’s issue as being one of ending a sentence with a preposition so much as the “at” being redundant and unnecessary.
FWIW, Turkish does the same thing, in effect. In Turkish, ne means ‘what’ and -re is a combining form meaning ‘place’. So that nere by itself means ‘what place’, i.e. ‘where’. Except the normal way to ask “where” in Turkish is “nerede?” The -de is the locative case ending that means ‘at’.
I grew up in southern Ontario too, (now eastern Ontario) and it grates my ears as well.
It’s not a west coast thing at all. Watch any episode of “Cops” and I swear, every cop uses this pattern: Where’s your ID at?," “Where do you live at?.”
If you’re not used to it it’s jarring.
Here in the Chicago area (and I believe going up into Wisconsin and perhaps Minnesota), we have the construction “come with” as in “Can I come with?” instead of perhaps the more usual “Can I come along”. I believe it comes from the German verb mitkommen. I never realized that it was an unusual construction until college, when I started mingling with people from other parts of the States and world. The “at” ending of location interrogatives is pretty normal here, too.
Yeah, I had to turn my thinking around like this back when I learned that “to ax” instead of “to ask” was a long-used expression, dating back over 1000 years, and had always been the standard term for large subsections of the english-speaking population when it wasn’t the actual majority term.
So now I save my upset for inappropriate apostrophe use. 
I know! Nothing grates like unnecessary apostrophe’s, right?
Well, what had happened was…
I do get a bit annoyed if someone asks me, “Where is the ATM machine at?” 
For those who find it redundant (and I understand the reasoning), are these questions also containing redundancies?
“Where is it currently?”
“Where is it located?”
To me the first question implies that something has moved recently, so it’s not entirely redundant. But removing the word “currently” shouldn’t change the answer, unless the answer might be, “It moves around and its location depends on the time and date.”
I think in the second question the word “located” just means the same thing as “at”, it just sounds a bit more elegant.
What, you mean at this moment in time?
j
Yes. And we need to know sooner, rather than later.
You remember that line from “The Stone Troll”:
Said Tom: “I don’t see why the likes o’ thee
Without axin’ leave should go makin’ free”
Ax for ask is way older than 1,000 years; it goes back through Old English clear through Proto-Germanic and all the way back to Proto-Into-European. The k and s in that verb have been dancing the do-si-do for 5,000 years now.
Edited to conform with logic.
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