Pearls Before Swine
Yesterday I needed some brackets. I found what I needed at Home Depot and decided to use the new "self check out" lane, thinking it would be faster.
Yeah. Not so much.
The bar code on the bracket was placed in a way that prevented me from getting it directly over the scanner. So I had to key the 12-digit item SKU into the touchscreen.
The item was correctly identified. But what of the next five brackets? Turns out I had to navigate to the "manual SKU entry" page and enter the code for each bracket individually.
On about bracket number five the cashier meanders over and says "Looks like you know your way around the computer." My good-natured reply was "I should, after having to key in the code for all these brackets one at a time."
Then I made a mistake.
I started offering her some suggestions on how they could make it better. Like a way to enter a quantity. Or prompting you with other items you've already keyed in when you go to manually enter something - you know, "Did you want another of these?" kind of thing. I really was trying to be helpful.
Her eyes quickly glazed over and she wandered away. Oh well.
The moral of the story? Make sure the barcode is on an outside edge of whatever you are purchasing in the self-checkout line at Home Depot. And if it's not, just suffer in silence. They don't want to hear about it.
Ok, but surely you understand that your time would be better spent writing to the people that actually plopped it in the stores...that gal is likely very well aware of the things it -doesn't- do by now if she's been working in the area and if she could fix it, she would just to stop hearing about it!