Whenever I walk into a Walmart, I have to hold my nose a little bit as I walk through the aisles. It’s mostly from the other customers.
But seriously folks, as much as I would love to shop at mom-and-pop stores, there’s just not much choice depending on the community that you live in. Like a small town in Michigan that I like to take a trip to at least once a year for a few days as a little vacation.
The only retail store of any size for something like twenty miles in any direction is a Walmart. So, like we had to do when we took our medicine as children, I am compelled to hold my nose and hope the whole thing is over quickly.
Then one day, not that long ago, I walked into a Walmart and saw that there was an entire row of these self-checkout machines that was basically the guts of a cash register and the scanning apparatus.
There was maybe one actual person on an actual register, and that person was moving so slowly that time was actually beginning to move backward around them.
So, instead of hiring more staff and providing jobs to the community, Walmart decided in their infinite wisdom to just put a bunch of robots in the store and tell us to do a job they could pay someone to do.
These things got to be a pain in the neck the second you needed to weigh some fruit or something.
If anything went wrong, you would have to wait for the guardian of the self-checkout to come over and press a bunch of buttons that translated to “two pounds of apples”, and walk away without saying a word to you.
Then Walmart decided to introduce this Scan and Go nonsense that you can use in their stores. I tried it once. Didn’t like it. Actually made my trip longer because if you are working from a list, then scanning on your phone, and then crossing things off the list, it takes a heck of a lot of time.
Besides, what if I wanted to have one of those days where I don’t bring my phone with me? I’m then forced to contend with one of their damned robots.
It’s taken a while, but it seems that the folks in charge at Walmart have decided across most locations in the United States to hire more cashiers due to thousands of customers like myself complaining to no end.
It makes sense that they finally did this. I mean, why have ten registers if only two of them are going to be open?
