For my money, the greatest innovation of the new millennium has been the scan-it-yourself machines at the grocery store. No longer do impatient shoppers like myself have to stand in the regular line, waiting for a minimum wage cashier to work her way through baby wipes and Hungry Man dinners and Marlboros that the masses so often buy in large quantities, wasting my valuable leisure time in the process. Now, my fellow anti-social shoppers and I can ring up our groceries, pay, and leave with minimal human contact.
But lately, I have noticed that I have been waiting longer and longer to scan my items, and I have figured out why that is: Old people. For the first few years that these scan-it-yourself machines were around, only the bravest of the early adaptors would dare try to scan their own groceries. Elderly people would stay far away from this new, mysterious contraption, and a few undoubtedly wrote it off as “a tool of the devil.” But as old folks have acquired a firmer grasp on technology (thanks to computer classes down at the senior center), more and more of our grandparents have dared to try and scan their own groceries, with (at least from my perspective) disastrous results.
Over the past few months I have observed:
*An old woman with an entire cartful of groceries trying to scan them herself, despite the fact that the sign above the console clearly says “Small Orders Only”. The console at this particular store only give you three bags to fill, and you have to keep these bags in place until you pay. This woman kept trying to put her filled bags back in the cart. Each time she did, the machine would lock up and instruct her to put the bag back on the shelf. She would do this, and then put the same bag back in her cart. Eventually, she got flustered and simply walked out of the store.
*An old man trying to insert a check into the slot where you insert cash. He did this over and over, at least a half-dozen times, before the clerk came over and took his check.
*An elderly couple that accidentally pressed the “Espanol” language option and vainly tried to continue the transaction in Spanish, growing more and more frustrated until a kind shopper (not me) told them how to change the language to English.
*An old man who had a basket full of produce. He kept trying to scan zucchinis, grapefruits, and other assorted fruits and vegetables, despite the fact that none of the items had barcodes on them. Finally, annoyed, I went over and told him that to ring up these items, he had to hit the ‘Produce’ button, type in the number from the list, and place the item on the scanner to be weighed. He gave me a blank look, then put all his groceries back in the basket, hit ‘Cancel’, and went to get in a regular checkout line.
I propose that you have to get a license to operate the self-checkout. Unfortunately, if they continue to allow old people to drive cars, I think they are still going to be able to scan their own groceries. On the bright side, no old person has ever killed or injured anyone with the scan-it-yourself machine. So that's something...
