That poor people should only buy poor people stuff and stay within their own damn class, obviously.
Well, I like my grocery store pretty well. No loyalty cards (which, for the record, I hate) and the checkers are great.
My biggest complaint with the store is the lack of cashiers open at any given time. I know quite well that the checkout lines can go from empty as the Mojave desert to a complete fire drill in about 30 seconds, but that’s not MY problem. It’s the problem of grocery store management. Dammit, all people want is to buy their damn groceries and get the bleep out of there, but the store managers 1.) don’t schedule enough people 2.) don’t call more checkers when it gets busy 3.) when they finally do call for customer service up front, it takes 15 minutes for somebody to show up and open a station. What the hell are they doing, and where? For crissake I can get from the back of that store to the from in 90 seconds, and I’d make it 60 if my boss had called me.
I’m also not crazy about the bank, the coffee shop, the video rental, the change counting machine, the lottery ticket kiosk, etc. that along with other shoppers’ carts form a gauntlet that must be run to get out of the place. But that’s probably just cranky old me, who would rather go to a REAL coffee shop, prefer to get my videos online, count my own change for free, eschew lottery tickets, and am deeply suspicious of any bank paying rent to a grocery store.
Goody! In return you can have my plains AND I’ll toss in the multigrain ones.
Why does everything have to be healthy? We gotta die from something anyway…
The primary purpose of Foodstamps is not to feed poor people; it’s to provide subsidy to farmers & food manufacturers. Feeding the poor is just a nice side benefit.
Everywhere I’ve ever bought bagels? Sometimes, if they don’t have fresh, I have to get packaged, and once in a while, those are ONLY availabe in plain.
Joe
You can’t find plain chips in the chip aisle?
Joe
Maybe “poor” people have no business spending $14 dollars of their own money on a 12-pack of beer as well as $7 dollars on a pack of cigarettes, and then turn around and expect the fucking taxpayers to pay for their gourmet, high-end condiments, freshly squeezed organic orange juice and prime cuts of steak…
(a 12-pack of Miller High Life or Natural Light is $5.99)
You’re also in a wheelchair and therefore one of the “deserving” recipients. I don’t get comments often, but they’ve ranged from “you’re healthy - why don’t you have a job?” (I do, it just doesn’t pay enough to live on) to “if you’d dress nicer you could get a rich man to fuck and you wouldn’t need food stamps”. And some too crass to repeat outside the BBQ Pit.
Um… the cashier wasn’t the one who suggested I get a sugar daddy, that was the bitch in line behind me.
Asking for my PIN when I selected credit three times. Yes I know it’s a debit card but it also works as a credit card and I don’t want to enter my PIN!
Indiana sent me one in the mail. And I didn’t need to be photographed. I did have to give them a lot of paperwork, though.
I think you’re missing the point that this was her FIRST use of EBT. It’s not an uncommon mistake, what she did. She was likely a formerly middle class person fallen on hard times who hadn’t quite wrapped her head around the notion that EBT gives you a limited monthly allowance and when it runs out you get no more until next month.
Generally, they figure this out at the end of week two when the money runs out and they start discovering the joys of food pantries and soup kitchens.
Yeah, but that’s a hell of a nice side-effect, don’t you think?
Where can you get a pack of cigarettes for only $7?
Until last year, I think they were only about $4.50 here in SLC; They apparently raised the taxes on tobacco around 80% during last year’s state legislative session, much to the delight of faithful Mormons, much to the dismay of the Godless, heathen smokers…
Giving rise to Smokeleggers and unlicensed “Smoke-easies.”
They’re slacking off, that’s what. I worked in a grocery store and yes, a lot of the cashiers will “be in the bathroom” for 30 minutes if things slow down enough for them to get away. And yes, they will take 15 minutes to come back to the registers because they don’t want to be there and don’t care that it’s a problem for YOU. If it’s at night, the front end crew may be trying to get the nightly chores done (Sweep and mop, block and face certain sections, and cleaning the break room are things we had to do at my store). If someone is doing these chores, then they might not be keen to get back at their till. All this is the result of individual employees being crappy, not store policy.
Clearly YMV, but from when I worked at Safeway, there would only be a certain number of checkers scheduled and those people would do only that. Additional checkers, if needed, would have to come from the other departments in the store like produce or dairy, so while that provided extra checkers it also meant that other stuff around the store was not getting done and other stations were going unmanned.
And as someone who at one point worked in every department in the store, management included, I can tell you I was always loathe to go up front and help because I knew I could be stuck up there for up to an hour or more sometimes and I had my own shit to do, and I couldn’t always blame it on management not scheduling enough people because the store was only allotted a specific number of hours per week to be doled out to everyone. The problem was corporate, not anyone at the store level.
My advice would be to take a comment card and fill it out, every time you visit. They do actually read them, believe it or not, or at least they did when I worked for them.
Cards in our state (Michigan) come in the mail and don’t have any photos on them at all.
They’re running a little under $6 here, and if I get them by the carton, it’s $4.67 a pack. The Illinois police keep an eye out for cigarette smugglers coming from Missouri.
I just got back from a vacation that included Virginia and North Carolina. Prices averaged about $4.00 or so per pack depending on the brand.
Adding my main gripe about grocery stores: I know I’m weird in that I prefer paper bags instead of plastic. I generally start the bagging myself if possible, and I tell the cashier I want paper. So they usually start by stuffing a paper bag inside the plastic one. No, I do NOT want plastic bags. None, nada, nyet, non.
I also don’t think it’s rocket science to figure out the basics of proper bagging. Do not put all the heavy stuff in one bag. Put all the frozen stuff together. If possible fit the rest of the refrigerated items in that bag too. Do not load so much stuff in the bag that I will need a professional weightlifter to carry the bag from the car to my house. However, it is not necessary, EVER, to put a single item in a bag, unless it’s so poorly packaged that it’s leaking. Try to balance out the weight. Don’t put heavy stuff on top of squishable things like bread or tomatoes.
I have actually on occasion unbagged and re-bagged the order right there at the counter, explaining to the cashier/bagger why I’m doing it, while he/she is ringing up the rest of the order. And I’m probably taking less time than he/she did to begin with.
Finally, I do NOT understand how putting a carton of eggs inside of a flimsy plastic bag protects it from breakage. I mean, the eggs are already snugly enclosed in either cardboard or styrofoam. How is one layer of flimsy plastic going to make any difference?
That’s not for breakage, that’s so if they break the leakage is contained.
Well that actually makes some sense:smack: