EXACTLY! I was genuinely shocked many years ago when I discovered that not only do gift cards expire, but the amount of money left on them actually slowly gets drained away until they expire. That's some B.S. right there. You gift a card to someone, they put it away, forget about it, find it again 6 months later. Go to use it, and there's now half the amount left on it! Maybe even less. As bad as MetroCards are, not even the corrupt NYC politicians are THAT greedy.
Self-checkout and receipt checks
- Thread starter idleprocess
- Start date
Help Support Candle Power Flashlight Forum
Tony Impreveduto, a NJ Assemblyman sponsored a bill that got passed into law that prohibits that. Perhaps you could look it up, and suggest it to your NY Assemblyperson.
Got Lumens?
Flashlight Enthusiast
It was about 5 years ago I used a pay at the pump.
That C-store put a $125 hold on my bank card on a Friday night for $20 in gas.
Never again. When a customer uses the same card with inside cashier, there were no
"Surprise" we just drained your account for 3+days and we ain't giving it back, you're SOL.
Thank You for shopping here....
That C-store put a $125 hold on my bank card on a Friday night for $20 in gas.
Never again. When a customer uses the same card with inside cashier, there were no
"Surprise" we just drained your account for 3+days and we ain't giving it back, you're SOL.
Thank You for shopping here....
+
Yesterday I was at a local home improvement store,, forgot something after I paid.
Didn't really want to leave my cart, so I went back in the store to get the item w/ my cart & stuff.
Showed a different check out woman my receipt when I went though the line again, she looked at my cart/receipt for a long time,
____________________ kinda too long.
I figured store workers are aware cameras are on them as well.
Yesterday I was at a local home improvement store,, forgot something after I paid.
Didn't really want to leave my cart, so I went back in the store to get the item w/ my cart & stuff.
Showed a different check out woman my receipt when I went though the line again, she looked at my cart/receipt for a long time,
____________________ kinda too long.
I figured store workers are aware cameras are on them as well.
idleprocess
Flashaholic
Alternatively, you presented that day's edge case outside of typical cases leaning on rapid subconscious processing that allows for efficient handling of routine transactions with negligible conscious thought.
IMA SOL MAN
Flashlight Enthusiast
Someone has written too many white papers, research papers, dissertations or something! Whew! I hope you don't work for the government or a university.
idleprocess
Flashaholic
Let me try again.
I was once a cashier for about 6 months. It took me all of about 3 days to learn the register, the scanning process, bagging, then get good at the flow of the entire checkout process. Another couple days to handle the common exceptions. Another ~week to make change faster than I could key in the currency tendered. At that point I scarcely had to think about the checkout process and could instead chat up the customer which took actual mental bandwidth.
But sometimes something would happen that would trip me up. And it was a futile repeated action or three until my conscious thought caught up and could troubleshoot the process after a few seconds. i.e.:
- Missing barcode
- Mis-identified bit of produce
- Something got misplaced
- An unusual flow exception - wrong price (a ~12oz container of strawberries was once priced at $2400.99 - clearly someone goofed on data entry), bad SKU information, customer decided they didn't want something I bagged 30 seconds ago
IMA SOL MAN
Flashlight Enthusiast
He got inside her OODA loop, by behaving in an unexpected, never-encountered manner. It took her brain time to process what was happening, and come up with a proper, job safe response. Totally normal.
Studying disaster scenario responses by individuals is interesting--some people freeze, others "mill" trying to process what is going on and respond with a habitual behavior, others respond immediately, and get out of the danger or lead others out who don't know how to respond.
Police, military, CCW, all train for predetermined responses to emergency scenarios, so that when it happens, they don't have to think how to respond, they rely on what they have been trained to do. This can be lifesaving or lethal, depending on whether or not an adversary is knowledgeable of the trained responses.
PhotonWrangler
Flashaholic
Exactly. And that exfiltrated data will be re-sold again and again.
+
Maybe people should start using cash more, have a grasp on their spending.
> Speed up the checkout line also >
$1,000,000,000,000 in cc balances
Credit card balances jumped in the second quarter and are above $1 trillion for the first time
Credit card debt 30 or more days late rose to 7.2% in the second quarter, up from 6.5% in Q1 and the highest rate since the first quarter of 2012.
idleprocess
Flashaholic
Not quite the message that you're trying to send, but I found that one of the biggest personal benefits of achieving a reasonable degree of success ~20 years ago was that I didn't have to pay close attention to prices at the grocery store any more. If I wanted something ordinary - cashews, ground beef, cereal, whatever - I just bought it unless the price was astronomical.
To the extent this reduces the item count it will also increase the end-of-transaction handling time as the cashier counts the funds and makes change. Or in the case of a kiosk, feeding currency and coinage into the machine.
letschat7
Flashlight Enthusiast
I dislike that at Krogers or Lowes there are very few aisles with cashiers and the lines are long. I will only buy locally if I'm supporting an actual worker. The Europeans can ship me virtually anything I need if I wanna self check out online.
+
Nooo, cash is far faster.
All the initial command promps to get started with card
Asking for pin, or type of payment etc..
Then the processing time and the usual hangs ~~~`~~~~systems busy..
All the questions asked:: do you want do donate this or that, emailed receipt that,, did you enjoy your experience,, who would you vote for,,, do you drive an EV.,,
I'll bet cash takes half as long.
letschat7
Flashlight Enthusiast
Cash is king when the power is out and the card reader don't work.
Having a person in front of you who is paying with a lot of change while talking is not faster than a credit card.
letschat7
Flashlight Enthusiast
That is a great way to refill a drawer though.
idleprocess
Flashaholic
Can't speak to your experiences but in my region I've seen the following:
- Demographic
There are types that are going to struggle regardless- Plastic they'll not understand payment options, loyalty program, whatnot
- Cash, with a cashier
- They'll be struggling with the same questions
- Trying to pay with exact change is common
- Cash, self-pay will be a struggle to feed bills (and then coins) into the machine
- Check you're going to be there a while as they rebel against the idea that the POS printer will print the check for them to sign to be scanned again for validation
- Procedural
- Chip / RFID reads were slow a ~decade ago but have been optimized to be about the same as a magswipe; last time I gad to wait for validation was a run-down roadside gas station where I could hear the modem dialing out (and recognized the tones of a 56k modem grudgingly accepting a 28.8k rate). Main issue with chip cards is corrosion/schmutz accumulating on contacts.
- Outside of certain niches (C-stores, liquor stores, smoke/head shops), cashiers just don't handle cash with the regularity they used to thus haven't developed the mental hardwiring to process it efficiently; during my brief tenure as a cashier some 20 years ago
- Similar to the demographic section, many cash customers want to pay with exact change and it's an Uncle Bumblef__k routine as they look for that last penny they couldn't be arsed to stage with the rest of their coinage
- Banknote validators have seen steady improvement since their introduction on vending machines in the 90s but they remain fiddly things that reject a high percentage of notes Because Reasons™
Sales process will be fundamentally broken anyway with the POS terminal out of action. Same with external comms and cloud accounting software.
IMA SOL MAN
Flashlight Enthusiast
I remember working in a discount store during an ice storm power outage. Customers were escorted by a clerk with a flashlight one at a time, got their supplies (batteries, Coleman fuel, mantles, whatever) and then at the checkout, the items were totaled by calculator and cash sales done. We may have taken some local checks, maybe credit cards, I don't remember, that was a long time ago (late 1970's, early 1980's). But we still marked items with price stickers then, no bar codes and scanners at that time. Good times, good times! Nowadays, I guess we all are just S.O.L.. Oh well, in the big cities, folks just take what they want without paying anyway, during normal times, so I guess nothing will change. Merchants will just turn in the shrinkage to their insurance companies...
idleprocess
Flashaholic
Dog whistles are fun, I guess.
