You'd Better Self-Check Yourself

We have memberships to both Costco and Sam’s Club. When I say “we,” I mean my wife and mother-in-law share a membership to Costco, and I’m not legally allowed to go there by myself.

But I do all the grocery shopping, so my wife recently agreed to let me into Sam’s Club. I’m honestly not sure if she trusts me more now, or if she just got tired of having to make special trips when we needed toilet paper or paper towels.

Sam’s Club has the only self-checkout system I’ve seen to-date that actually works well. It’s called “Scan & Go” and you scan your own stuff into the cart with your phone as you travel around the store loading up your cart.

It’s very user friendly, and even has a running total on the screen so you know when to cry, because you’re only a third of the way down your list. When you’re done shopping and woefully over budget, you just push your cart to the exit. A clerk scans the checkout code on your phone, then beeps a few things in your cart, and you’re out the door. You never unload your cart until you get to the car.

I’m here today to urge all stores in the United States to adopt this wonderful technology, or stop having “self-checkout” at your stores. Your version of self-checkout doesn’t work. It may be “checkout,” but it’s not “self.”

Let’s start with the bagging area. Why is there always an unexpected item there? What exactly were you expecting? I don’t know what you thought was supposed to happen in the bagging area, but I do know what always does happen – the whole checkout process comes to a halt and the screen informs me that “Assistance is Needed.”

No, assistance is not needed. Not ever. I know how to scan something and then put it in a bag. I’m over the age of two, and I drove myself here. Any time assistance is needed, this just stopped being self-checkout, and turned into team-checkout, where both teammates are annoyed.

Expecting an item in the bagging area hasn’t worked from Day One, Minute One of self-checkout. Figure it out!

And no, you haven’t figured it out with your handy “Skip Bagging” button. First of all, it’s an extra button I have to push after each scan, when I shouldn’t have to be pushing any buttons at all. Secondly, it seems to only allow me to skip bagging about two to three times in a row before “Assistance is Needed.”

Again, team-checkout.

There are a few of you stores out there that have it mostly figured out. You have a hand scanner that works and you have successfully abandoned any concerns about my bagging process. But you guys seem to think you’re Costco.

Costco has a person stationed at the door to check your receipt on the way out. They always have. That’s because after checkout, on your way out of Costco, you could grab a 72” TV, a Persian rug, a refrigerator, or any number of other high-value items between the food court and the door.

The rest of you are not Costco. There’s nothing – or at least, nothing of any substantial value – between the checkout and the door, so stop acting like you’re a security guard at a bank.

If I have already unloaded and reloaded my cart when I checked out – either from one of your regular checkers, or under the watchful eye of the self-checkout assistance-giver – I am not interested in going through another line before leaving so you can glance at my receipt and tell me to have a nice day.

If you want to sit there and tell me to have a nice day, go nuts. I’ll wish you a great day right back. But I’m not standing in another line and getting the receipt back out of my wallet.

You want to check my receipt? Get Scan & Go.

See you soon,

-Smidge

 

Copyright © 2024 Marc Schmatjen

 

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Let's Keep Mom Happy, Boys

My wife scares me sometimes. Normally it’s just when she’s driving, but last night was an entirely different kind of fear. You see, I’ve never needed to dispose of a body, but last night my wife changed that.

She arrived home from Costco and asked for our help out on the driveway to unload the car. While the kids were busy struggling to move the fifty-five gallon drum of laundry soap and the five-gallon pails of peanut butter into the house, my wife was nudging me with her elbow and speaking in whispered code about the “item” in the trunk.

When I went to investigate she hissed “Not yet!” at me with a look in her eyes that made me shiver. I found myself glancing nervously up and down the street, afraid one of the neighbors might become suspicious.

“What is in the trunk?” I whispered through my teeth while deliberately not making eye contact and trying to appear as if I was just inspecting one of our drought-stricken bushes.

“We’ll talk later,” she whispered back, sternly. “We have to wait until it gets dark.”

OK, now I’m more than a little nervous. My flight instinct is in full gear. I want to run, but I can’t leave the kids. Must stay calm.

After an hour or so of my mind and pulse racing with all possible scenarios running through my head, we put the kids to bed. I kissed them each on the forehead and said a little prayer that I might get to see them again. Who knows what this night will bring?

Back downstairs on wobbly legs, I nervously followed my mysterious and scary wife out to the car. As she popped the trunk latch I instinctively flinched. And there he was.

“What did you do!?” I half yelled.

“Keep your voice down! The neighbors might hear.” She shot back. “It was on sale. I couldn’t help it. It’s for Christmas.”

There, taking up every cubic inch of air space in our Toyota Camry’s trunk, was the largest teddy bear I have ever seen. It was easily twice as big as my mother.

“Christmas!? It’s September. I have to hide this thing??? They already have two hundred stuffed animals, and you bought one that is bigger than all of them put together?”

“They saw it last time we were at Costco, and they loved it,” she said.

“Doesn’t Costco sell anything that’s normal size? It’s bad enough that I have to have a ten-quart plastic barrel of mayonnaise, but do they have to sell teddy bears the size of Smart cars, too?”

“Oh, relax. It’s not that big.”

“Not that big!? You couldn’t fit a breath of fresh air into this trunk with this thing. Did you have to remove the spare tire to get it in there?”

“OK, OK, just help me get it out.”

Just like a typical Tuesday night in New Jersey, there we were, pulling the body out of the trunk. I got him under the arms and she took the legs, and we moved him into the garage.

“OK,” she said, slightly out of breath after we’d gotten him up on the workbench. “Now just bag him up and hide him.”

I have fifty-gallon black plastic garbage bags that I use in the fall. They are massive. I got them at Costco. You can fit all the leaves from a medium-sized tree into one bag. I opened one of them and wrestled it over the bear’s head. When it was completely down over the top of him, it only came to his waist. There were two furry legs sticking out the bottom like a back alley crime scene in Disneyland’s Critter Country.

“What do we do now?” I asked. “He doesn’t fit.”

“Well, honey, it’s simple. Normally you just cut off their legs, but in this case, we are keeping him, so you just need to fold him up a little.” She then proceeded to fold, stuff, lie on, and seal up the garbage bag, with a very compressed giant Costco bear inside. “See, there you go.”

“What do you mean, ‘Normally you just cut their legs off..’?” I asked.

“Never mind,” she said, glancing away. “Just stuff him in the back of the closet, OK?”

“Anything you say, honey. I love you so much!”

I guess I should be thankful I wasn’t digging a hole in the middle of the night by the glow of a Lincoln Town Car’s headlights, but that whole thing left me a little on edge.

Merry Christmas, boys. Don’t ever do anything to anger your mom.

I think I’ll try to learn how to sleep with my eyes open.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

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Remote Training My Kids

I have decided what I really want for Christmas. Shock collars. For my kids. I know shock collars are traditionally put on hunting dogs, but I see some real potential for them in the arena of parenting. Actually, they are now known as “remote trainers” in the hunting world, since most of them have a feature where you can first send your misbehaving pooch an audible tone instead of a shock. If they don’t get the message to heel from the beep in their ear, then you can hit them with the voltage to straighten them out.

That’s a good system, and “remote trainer” is a good name for what I want to outfit my children with. I’m not sure a big dog collar is really the way to go with kids, but it will have to do until the technology catches up and we can have implantable chips behind their ears.

The idea hit me the other morning while I was in my office. My boys were in the game room down the hall watching early morning cartoons, and my wife was still sleeping. They were forgetting to use their whisper voices during an argument about Phineas and Ferb, and I was forced to get out of my chair and walk down the hall to shush them. Since my wife was sleeping in the next room, I couldn’t just remain seated and yell for them to be quiet.

Besides the obvious irony of yelling “Be quiet,” we are trying to do less remote voice-activated parenting, not more. Standing in one place and yelling castigations at your kids is a very Walmart style of parenting, and we are looking to parent at at least a Target or Costco level. The remote trainer would help tremendously in that effort, since our house is 3200 square feet. I don’t want to yell, but I also don’t want to walk up all those damn stairs again just to quietly tell one of my boys to stop sitting on the other one.

The children’s remote trainer I’m envisioning would go much further than the canine version, since we are dealing with humans here, even if the difference is hard to perceive most days. The kid’s collars would obviously have the shock feature and the audible tone, but they would also have a two-way intercom, a closed-circuit video camera, a muted listening mode, and even a heart rate monitor.

Picture the scene:

You are lounging comfortably in the living room with your favorite (insert time-sucking device here). You hear one of your offspring fail to use his or her nice words. The situation is escalating, and soon there will be hurt feelings (or noses) if cooler adult heads do not intervene. You call out for your spouse, but they have obviously fled the house in search of a more peaceful environment. It is up to you to discipline your children. Drat.

If you are striving to parent above a Walmart level, this is when you would normally have to resist your natural urge to yell “Knock it off!” at the top of your lungs and actually move your butt out of the chair. No need! Enter your saving grace, the Smidge Long distAnce Parenting Electronic Module, or SLAP ‘EM, for short. Just pull up the SLAP ‘EM app on your smartphone, choose the offending child from the home screen, and pick your mode of action. A friendly audible tone to alert the offending youngster that punishment is coming if immediate action is not taken to apply the golden rule and use your nice words, or perhaps a friendly conversation with the tyke on the intercom located just below his or her chin. After getting laid out on the carpet a few times with the 2000-volt “enforcer” mode, your little cutie pies should straighten up and fly right at the first hint of sound from their new collars.

Afraid they might try to remove the collar and negate its effectiveness? Not to worry. Any unauthorized tampering with the locking clasp and the enforcer mode is triggered. Zap! They won’t try that twice.

Things a little too quiet in the next room? Check the video feed and listen in to see what your angel is up to. You can check their vital stats, too. Monitor heart rate and breathing for their safety, and also to make sure they didn’t somehow Houdini the thing off and leave it lying on the floor while you mistakenly think they are just having an impromptu nap.

With a 20-year battery life and the app running off your Wi-Fi at home, and your cell signal when your child is roaming, the SLAP ‘EM will have an unlimited range, so you can use it when they are in elementary school all the way through grad school. You can monitor their school day from the comfort of your couch, or if you prefer, shareable access codes to the smartphone app will allow other parents and even their teachers to keep them in line at all times. Sleepovers will cease to be the chaotic nightmare they once were when all the kids see their names on your SLAP ‘EM home screen.

“What about my younger kids?” you ask. Although we no longer have any toddlers in the house, I remember them as being a handful. They make toddler leashes, but do you really want to step over that line and put your toddler on an actual leash? Of course you do. You just don’t want to be actually seen in public with your kid on an actual leash, but in public is exactly where you need it. Problem solved with the SLAP ‘EM! You have your cell phone in your hand at all times anyway, so why not let that fact put the fear of God into your little munchkins? It’s an electronic leash, with no unsightly, shame-inducing actual physical tether.

No kid will be safe when you can always reach out and SLAP ‘EM! (All rights reserved) Look for them at fine retailers -- or at least at Walmart -- by next Christmas.

What will all this surveillance and instant punishment do to the next generation of children? No telling, but I’m sure everything will turn out just fine.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2013 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!