I absolutely HATE Walmart. I should hate them for their exploitation of workers, their shit products or any number of their shit corporation’s dealings. But the thing that drew the final blow for me was an incident dealing with their self checkout and their system of ascribing guilt for theft without any due process.
I went to a store about half an hour away from where I lived as they aren’t common near where I’m from. Bought several items including a marker board. Checked out using self checkout. Marker board was too big to fit into a bag, so I set it aside to bring with me after scanning everything. Well, as luck would have it, when I got home I realized I never brought my marker board home but I had paid for it and had the receipt to prove it. I called the store and explained the situation to the manager at customer service who assured me I could come to the store and pickup the item, no troubles.
So I drove back up to the store hour round trip. I get there and the customer service line is about 15 people deep at this point. Only one person behind the counter. After about 30 min waiting in line, I finally get up to the counter and explain my issue, showing the receipt and that I had spoken to a manager earlier and that they said to come in and it would be fine to pickup the marker board. Well, not only was it not fine, but then the woman behind the counter, after having a discussion with her security dept over the phone who “reviewed the footage” from my checkout, decided that I had actually attempted to put something into my pocket to steal something!? Incredulously, I asked her why on earth I would go through the trouble to come all this way back to the store for an item that I clearly paid for along with about $60 worth of other stuff which again, also clearly paid for, if I had stolen something!? She refused to budge and I was honestly shocked she had the audacity to accuse me of theft 100% seriously. I left that store and haven’t set foot in a Walmart since. It’s been 4 years and it’s the best consumer decision I’ve ever made.
I lived with my partner and her parents for a couple of years. At some point her mom started getting more groceries from Walmart; around that time I started having badddd reactions to the food. She doesn’t get groceries from Walmart anymore.
Oh, absolutely. No hate to the customer service woman. I realize she was probably under pressure from the powers that be, but nevertheless, she enforced the absurd policy (understandably, girl’s gotta eat), didn’t make the experience any more palatable for me, however.
It would be awesome to have a base-12 number system paired with a base-12 measurement system. It’s just so much nicer to deal with than metric or imperial. So many measurements would become much easier. Take length. You could have the base measurement be equal to a meter, then use 1/3 meter sticks as roughly equivalent to a 1 foot ruler.
The scales. I bring my own bags and you have to tare the scale against your bags before you can start scanning and it only works right about ⅓ of the time. So someone has to come set it for me.
If I don’t bring my own bags inside, my only option at self checkout is plastic. Paper bags are offered by cashiers. I like to know my bags can actually be recycled.
Self checkout is constantly populated by old folks who would have had IE jam packed with garbage toolbars 15 years ago. They can’t work self checkout any faster than they could have waited in line.
There is a 25 item limit. I see people with 40+ items in self checkout all the time. It just bogs down what used to be a fast thing.
Finally, the biggest reason I stopped using it is because part of the cost of my groceries is to have a worker to ring me up and another to bag my stuff. By using self checkout, I’m saving the store owner money. I am being the customer and the worker. This is my way of fighting back. If the cost of my groceries is going up, I’m going to make sure that someone else has that little bit of extra job security. If we all stop using self checkout, they have to keep more cashiers on hand. I don’t think I have to explain how more people having more available hours to work is a better societal alternative.
Personally I’m in favor of extreme automation like self checkout. The real issue is that the workers don’t see the return the buisness owners do. Like imagine if we had UBI + good unemployment and then it wouldn’t really be an issue. Walmart would have to compete with people going home
Then when you do move fast (I always do because I’m impatient af) a crowd of employees will gather behind you because they think you’re stealing. No, I’m just stressed that I had to watch all these slow fucks take their sweet ass time scanning their shit.
I don't recall there being a item limit. Which is unfortunate because the people who have boatloads of carts and their carts already loaded. They're the most fucking slowest ever that they even give old people a run for their money. Slowly raising items to scan. Slowly putting them in bags. Slowly paying. Slowly moving the fuck out of the way as they try navigating a heavy cart with all of the junk that they'll barely like as soon as it gets home.
There used to be pretty clear signage about item limits that were ignored anyway, and now they don’t have real cashiers, so the item limits either doesn’t or functionally doesn’t exist.
I don’t think I have to explain how more people having more available hours to work is a better societal alternative.
It’s only better if a human cashier can do the job better. Otherwise, you’re just making humans do money-work as an excuse to give them more hours.
For example, I could do everything at work on a pad with a pencil instead of using a computer. I would certainly have more hours!
The reason why that sounds insane is because everybody recognizes that using a computer is much faster and more efficient, so you should use that instead.
I once had a Walmart employee follow me out of the building and start banging on my window screaming at me they’re calling the cops
Why?
I, while using a cane in one hand and the other occupied by a bag of dog food that was making me regret not waiting for a scooter, didn’t stop to chat with the old woman who was arbitrarily checking people’s receipts.
I told him he’s lucky I’m more level headed than most of my neighbors, because he would have been shot the moment he banged on glass and yelled, but if they want my receipt they can go watch the fucking cameras because I have somewhere to be.
Could I have handled it more calmly and with more understanding? Probably. But if you follow me out into the parking lot and start screaming at me, consider all respect lost, all decency dropped. You get back what you came in with.
Literally, the only reason I even went to Walmart is because the pet store I get the good food from had their registers all crash and wouldn’t start back up.
A loss prevention guy followed my sister to her car after dark once, he thought she took something and wanted to check her receipt. she was sobbing cause she thought she was about to get raped. Loss prevention officers are just idiotic jackasses who aren’t smart enough to do anything else.
Not saying it is right, but shopkeepers can legally detain customers long enough to figure out if a theft happened. They have to have a reason to suspect it, though.
Fuck em anyway, I pay for my shit and unless it’s a real cop who might shoot me if I twitch funny, I ain’t stopping for shit.
If they don’t want to pay for cashiers, they can deal with people stealing shit. Walmart especially is a corp on welfare, they have the most employees receiving food stamps and Medicaid than any other company. I don’t really care if the government subsidized megacorp loses money every year, they aren’t providing worthwhile jobs anyway.
It doesn’t matter what Walmart or anyone except Costco (part of membership contract) and probably Sam’s club (contract again) says. Once you’ve purchased it they have NO legal right to inspect and you have NO legal obligations to stop. That being said I know the folks doing that job are not assholes so I will politely refuse and wish them a nice day.
In DC they they have the same type of legal witness called special police. Once one tried to stop me and I refused saying , “Call the police if you think I stole something” and kept going.
I’m not going to be harassed by employees after I’ve legally purchased profucts.
Please note if you are planning on running a scam or sneaking shit out, don’t draw attention to yourself. One law at a time is the rule.
I just smile and say “no thank you” and keep going. There’s nothing they can do unless they actually think you stole something and they don’t have the manpower to detain everyone who won’t stop for their receipt check.
Note though that doesn’t apply to Sam’s Club or Costco or similar, if you’re a “member” there you agreed to the checks.
They can’t detain you even if they think you have stolen, though (from a store policy perspective). There’s a reason all these stores train employees “observe don’t interfere”.
so long as the shopkeeper has cause to believe that the person detained in fact committed, or attempted to commit, theft
Shop keepers privilege can’t be used as a reason to detain customers for a receipt check. They don’t have “cause” as they did not see the person concealing anything.
That’s true! Receipt checks can get lost! I was replying to “They can’t detain you even if they think you have stolen” though. The “can’t” is a store policy thing, not a law thing.
I still don’t understand the English insistence on borrowing words from other languages, yet refusal to standardize spelling into ways that actually make sense within the language.
So I still blame English for being silly with their transliteration.
William the Bastard of Normandy was the grandson of a fellow named Rollo the Viking.
Rollo had conquered the French northern coast and wrecked so much shit the French king just offered to make him a vassal, and give him more land in the process, if he protected the land he’d taken from other Viking raiders. This area would develop a hybrid culture from the mixing of the Germanic invaders and French population.
English, already a bastardized Germanic language, combined from the spoken languages of Germanic invaders who would come to be known as Anglo-Saxons and the native population, got further hybridized by a French Viking who actually spoke a French-Germanic dialect known as Norman.
Tl;Dr
Sea Germans hate linguistic purity, and English’s problems are all their fault.
But also, English spelling can’t standardize because English pronunciation isn’t standard. West Coast vs Midwest vs South vs East Coast have vastly different accents. Any spelling reform that makes English phonetic for one would be wrong for the others.
And it keeps changing! People keep moving and interacting with other languages, adding and dropping words and accents over time.
His subreddit is a massive echo chamber. I got insta-banned for daring to have any criticism of one of his opinions; a criticism so mild it shouldn’t have attracted any attention at all.
Lemmy is an echo chamber too. Pro-Linux, anti-Google, pro-Socialism, anti-conservative. I’m still here because I happen to agree with the echo chamber, but let’s not pretend that a diversity of ideas are allowed equal say on this platform.
A lot of ideas don’t deserve a platform or airtime and people need to realize that. The world is getting more fucked every day because people think that conservatives, fundamentalists, corporations and their bootlickers, and all the other fascist scum have a right to spew their shitty ideas for everyone to hear. Those ideas are sorthless though and they need to be silenced.
There are ideas that don’t deserve a platform (like literal Nazis) and then there are ideas that are not allowed on here because disagreement itself unacceptable. To give a non-politial example, imagine someone who made a post explaining why they like Windows better than Linux. That’s one out of many opinions that are simply not allowed on here.
I don’t know man, I like Linux but use windows because it’s easier to use with less hoops to jump through and I’ve said so on here without much backlash.
But windows / linux seems more like a meme on here than people actually fighting over it. Like I myself will sometimes make a PC MASTER RACE joke, but don’t actually give a shit what people game on.
But, back to your original point, I’d genuinely like more examples of things you think you are not allowed to say on here. I don’t like echo chambers so I think if there are valid points they deserve discussion.
It’s hard to give examples because any example that I give could be explained away by alternate explanations. But as someone who posts a lot on here, it does feel like going against the dominant narrative, even jokingly will get you down voted. Like, for example, if I said that I believed in a smaller government, it doesn’t really matter what reasoning I have behind it because that’s a conservative POV.
Personally I’m a Democrat and I also try not to let down votes stop me from expressing my own opinions. But there are certain viewpoints (that are not bigoted) that are extremely unpopular here.
I don’t think giving a list of examples will convince you otherwise; in my experience people are more likely to just argue about the examples in order to resist the point.
I asked a question the other day that gave the appearance that I might sympathise with a conservative viewpoint, and it was the most downvoted post of my entire life within 30 minutes. Let me reiterate - I was downvoted en masse for asking a good faith question and not accepting the Democratic narrative as a given. Folks instantly assumed I must be asking the question with an (conservative) answer already in mind, and dogpiled me for it.
Ironically enough, there was one good faith reply that answered my question and resulted in me ultimately agreeing with the Lemmy-approved viewpoint. But I almost didn’t get that answer due to the amount of bad-faith responses and downvotes I was swamped with.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you but anyone is free to spin up their own instance for Google worship or conservative discourse. There’s nothing standing in the way of that. I think your statement should be applied only to specific instances and not Lemmy/the Fediverse as a whole.
What’s up I’m a employeed, tax paying, US citizen. And I would suggest that anybody take advantage of the limited oversight over the Walmart self checkouts
These cock suckers decided that they would raise the prices on everybody under the cover of inflation. They did this knowing that it would drive people to suicide, it would drive people to be homeless, it would break part families and crush the American dream for so many people but they did it anyway.
It’s called plausible deniability… if you forget something in the self checkout, just be a nice person and say it was a mistake, and they will let you slide most of the time. Worst case scenario you have to go back in and pay. Best case scenario you get a bunch of free steak or something.
Very slim chance this actually happened. There no actual photo of the flag, just a digital image that was created. Which means if it was not the creator of the flag, but a third person- they’d have a photo of the flag or in the least- not bothered recreating it in photoshop, but just describing it in enough detail. And if it was the creator that posted this- it wouldn’t be in 3rd person suggesting “someone” did this.
Additionally, In the rare chance it did happen- it wouldn’t be enforced.
Based on all the comments here, you’d think anything posted on the internet is accepted as absolute truth. It’s not such a stretch to assume everyone believes this bullshit.
Well he won’t be doing anything regardless, since he’s currently suspended. Texas law dictates that anyone impeached by the state House (such as Paxton) is suspended from office while they await trial in the Senate.
It’s not even that. At the time they split, English wasn’t as standardized. You can see it looking back in the Lewis and Clark expedition journals written by Meriwether Lewis. He doesn’t even have consistency in his own writing, and he was no country bumpkin.
I love that self checkout used to be convenient and quick, but now it’s lower, way too many people trying to use them because they can’t pay people, and you still even have to deal with someone on the way out of the store anyway. Really glad that’s how stuff has evolved.
yeah i love the i just need 2 things, this is faster, and then now its the norm, like where are the profits going to come from if you have no customers?
midwest.social
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