Bags and Cups
The woman in the news stand in the building where I work was having a fight.
She was fighting with the bag of chips I was attempting to purchase.
In days of yore before barcodes took hold of everything, cashiers used to look at a price tag on an item and type it into an adding machine or a cash register. Now, thanks to progress we have scanners that scan a barcode that is incomprehensible to the consumer so generally speaking you have no idea how much something costs until you check out. The upside is the comedy that occurs when the bar code reader doesn’t work.
This particular news stand has a long history of trouble with chip bags. One savvy clerk just keeps one bag of chips behind the register and scans it for every bag of chips that gets purchased. He smartly avoids the trouble that was happening before my eyes.
The woman on duty for this particular purchase of mine first tried to wave the bag in a back and forth manner perpendicular to of the scanner. No dice. She tried moving it toward and away from the device. Nope. Then she grabbed the two corners of the bag to stretch the surface of the bar code as flat as possible. She pulled and she pulled and she pulled and just when I thought the bag would split and send the chips flying all over the two of us there was a beep.
“$1.39 please” (yeah, that’s what we pay for the small 99 cent bags here in Midtown).
The transaction only took about five times as long as it would’ve if she had typed “1” and then “3” and then “9” and then “enter”. The entertainment value was much higher however so, dear friends, if that isn’t progress I don’t know what is.
In other food purchase news, the cup of coffee that I purchased from a cart this morning came in a cup originally made for the Second Cup which is a Canadian coffee chain. Their product is far superior to the over hyped and over roasted Starbucks, though unfortunately it was regular Midtown coffee inside the container. I stared at the cup for a while trying to figure out how the hell it got here since the nearest Second Cup is, to my knowledge on the other side of the northern U.S. border when I noticed it was red and had snowflakes all over it. Obviously, it was a Christmas season design leftover that I surmise was sold to whoever distributes the cups to the vendors at a discount. The bottom lip of the cup revealed that it was made by dover (sic) Cup of Brampton, Ontario 1-800-736-9689. I dialed that number and was, as I expected, thrown into a voice mail queue. One of the options was “quality control”. If my cup had leaked, I would surely have punched that button and given them a piece of my mind, however the cup construction was solid and there were no leaks to report so I hung up.
It’s nice to see that even in this age of globalization you can reach out to someone when your cup is leaky. I hope I never have to take advantage of that option, but it’s nice to know it exists.
She was fighting with the bag of chips I was attempting to purchase.
In days of yore before barcodes took hold of everything, cashiers used to look at a price tag on an item and type it into an adding machine or a cash register. Now, thanks to progress we have scanners that scan a barcode that is incomprehensible to the consumer so generally speaking you have no idea how much something costs until you check out. The upside is the comedy that occurs when the bar code reader doesn’t work.
This particular news stand has a long history of trouble with chip bags. One savvy clerk just keeps one bag of chips behind the register and scans it for every bag of chips that gets purchased. He smartly avoids the trouble that was happening before my eyes.
The woman on duty for this particular purchase of mine first tried to wave the bag in a back and forth manner perpendicular to of the scanner. No dice. She tried moving it toward and away from the device. Nope. Then she grabbed the two corners of the bag to stretch the surface of the bar code as flat as possible. She pulled and she pulled and she pulled and just when I thought the bag would split and send the chips flying all over the two of us there was a beep.
“$1.39 please” (yeah, that’s what we pay for the small 99 cent bags here in Midtown).
The transaction only took about five times as long as it would’ve if she had typed “1” and then “3” and then “9” and then “enter”. The entertainment value was much higher however so, dear friends, if that isn’t progress I don’t know what is.
In other food purchase news, the cup of coffee that I purchased from a cart this morning came in a cup originally made for the Second Cup which is a Canadian coffee chain. Their product is far superior to the over hyped and over roasted Starbucks, though unfortunately it was regular Midtown coffee inside the container. I stared at the cup for a while trying to figure out how the hell it got here since the nearest Second Cup is, to my knowledge on the other side of the northern U.S. border when I noticed it was red and had snowflakes all over it. Obviously, it was a Christmas season design leftover that I surmise was sold to whoever distributes the cups to the vendors at a discount. The bottom lip of the cup revealed that it was made by dover (sic) Cup of Brampton, Ontario 1-800-736-9689. I dialed that number and was, as I expected, thrown into a voice mail queue. One of the options was “quality control”. If my cup had leaked, I would surely have punched that button and given them a piece of my mind, however the cup construction was solid and there were no leaks to report so I hung up.
It’s nice to see that even in this age of globalization you can reach out to someone when your cup is leaky. I hope I never have to take advantage of that option, but it’s nice to know it exists.
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