the only machine that throws money at my crotch

I have an apartment now, with a kitchen and a stove-- even an oven. I also have a life-sized fridge too. I have to say that upon moving in to my new place I had a feeble and horrible fridge that had one door. You open one big door and you had a freezer on the top half with a new door. Basically my freezer was a sub-unit within my fridge. No more though! With enough complaining, I got the ol' landlord to give me a new one. It's as tall as me and it has two doors. I'm very excited. Now I can take part in buying more food in one trip than many trips of small amounts of food. Of course that opens a whole new floodgate...

I'm a fan of modern convenience. I like that you can renew your car registration online or get books online. I don't want service people to be out of a job, but sometimes you just like to do stuff yourself. One of these things that is affecting the service industry is the self-checkout. I frequent the self checkout because I usually have only a few items and no one ever pays attention to those 15 or fewer lines anyway. I decided it was time I start doing my thing and taking care of myself. This was good for me because in one case you learn the woes of a cashier. You have to look up the fruit, weigh it, etc. One thing that the cashiers don't have to worry about is weighing the total contents of the entire order. Price Chopper, the secondary food store of NEPA has self-checkout, but I will never use it again.

WalMart has self checkout. It's great because you can get right out of a store that has at least 500 customers in it at all times. My only problem with the WalMart self checkout is that your light purchases don't ever get registered when you put them in the bag. I guess the machine thinks that you're pocketing the merchandise or that you might forget it. If you forget it, I think they should take a big "sorry MORON!" policy on that one, but I'm not a friend of the working man like Sam Walton. Of course-- if you pay attention to the screen, WalMart has given us a great "Skip Bagging" button, which allows us the ability to not bag our items, but put heavy ones back in the cart, like a TV for example. Anyway-- it's the greatest button on the screen, but often, no one sees it and they flag over the attendant.

Price Chopper lacks this feature, and any normal user functionality, as well as customer service in one trip. I walked up to the machine and scanned my card. I was ready to go. I scanned my soda, which was in an awkward box. Because I feared this box falling over and exploding on the floor, I gently placed it on the floor. The machine yelled at me and we started to argue. I put the bag on, then took it off and the machine was obviously getting bothered by my taunting. It punched me and I became indignant. I did not resort to violence however, I put the soda back on. I scanned my next item and saw that the bagging area was getting full, "I should move some of these to the cart." "No-no!" said the machine, after I had moved them. "Place your items back in the bag." This went on for some time until the attendant came over. "Put your items back on the bagging area," he said, "This whooole area is a scale." His dramatic hand gestures led me to explode in my head. "Look you little shit-- I'm no moron. I know how the damn machine works, but it shouldn't work so poorly. God forbid I buy more stuff than can fit on your precious scale. Then what do I do? Then what happens circus-boy?! How about you go back to your little stand and press your almighty buttons that give me a damn break instead of watching me perform a balancing act with all my food on your shitty scale? And while you're at it, lose the trendy Buddy Holly glasses because you probably don't even know who he is or why you're wearing them in the first place. You probably think he's the topic of a 1990's hit song, which, ironically, is when that trend went out of style," but all that came out was, "Pshh-- that's pretty stupid."

So he went back to his booth. I paid my money and got out of there with no problems. I usually thank the attendant for keeping a watchful eye on me and helping me through the checkout process. I didn't thank this dude though. I was very disappointed in him and I knew that Tammy Fritz, former excellent Price Chopper employee, would have been similarly dissatisfied. I may have to turn myself to the top of the line supermarket, Wegman's. Despite more expensive products, I can rest assured that the ample quantity of lines and qualified cashiers will guide me through the shopping process quite easily. And will I return to Price Chopper? Probably. I may never self-checkout again, but perhaps I will make new friends in the cashier line-- or more enemies in the 15 items or less.