Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

Book Plugs:

Buy 'em and I get
money. I think.
BSD Mall

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Friday, December 2, 2005
13:49 - About Wal-Mart (but not really) http://newdave.com/index.php/2005/12/02/wal-mart-vs-seemingly-everybody/	(top)
Good post here (via InstaPundit) about Wal-Mart and its detractors, and an equally good discussion thread that doesn't devolve into name-calling or snarkiness like it always does in real life whenever the subject comes up among my old-growth whole-bean friends. But that's not what I wanted to bring up. This is: About the long lines at Walmart: the large W-M recently opened near me (McHenry County, Illinois) has a substantial number of self-scan lanes. These seem to be the wave of the future in large discount and grocery stores. Undoubtedly we will now hear moans about how automation is destroying jobs. Undoubtedly. But add me instead to the moan roster about how automation is destroying the shopping experience. Granted, the auto-checkout kiosks in stores like Home Depot are great; I prefer them to the hands-on kind of checkout when I'm buying toilet seats or PVC piping or presealed bags of screws. But at the grocery store? No thank you. We're oscillating between Safeway and Albertson's for our shopping these days. They're both open 24 hours. Safeway has the advantage of slightly lower prices and of being closer, friendlier, and more recently renovated to achieve a very upscale interior look, especially in the produce and bakery areas; although they saw fit to replace the indoor shopping cart corral with a miniature Starbuck's, they correspondingly redid the outside fascia and apron area to accommodate them. But Albertson's has a much better selection; what they lack in price competitiveness or interior atmosphere they more than make up for in the quality of their produce, the selection of interesting cheeses, and their unwillingness to stop stocking something useful (like Sriracha sauce) just because enough people seem to want jalape�o-flavored potato chips for them to occupy ten feet floor-to-ceiling at all times (like at Safeway). Who cares if the lighting at Albertson's is glaring, the signage is cheap-looking, and the bakery section is poorly laid out: the peppers are taut and fresh and the pomegranates are huge. Despite their being further away and more annoying to get around in, I'd be willing to switch to Albertson's full-time except for one deal-breaking feature: they're switching to automated checkout. A number of times lately I've been in there and the checkout area has been staffed by a total of one employee: the one manning the podium at the four-station automated checkout lane. Which means I have exactly one choice for how to check out. Granted, using the self-scanner is fine for cans and bottles and bags. But what about produce? This is a use case that Home Depot doesn't have to deal with: you have to put the bag of vegetables on the scale, then press a series of slowly responding buttons, each screen triggering a loud, cheery narration�PLEASE SELECT FROM THE ITEMS ON THE SCREEN, OR KEY IN A NUMBER�until you've determined what exact kind of stuff you've got. Are these onions Maui Sweet, Vidalia Sweet, Vidalia, White, or The Kind You Hang On Your Belt? The button icons are no help�they all have the same identical "onion" bitmap, and my onions look nothing like what are pictured. I can't remember how the ones I picked up were labeled. I know it said "Sweet", but there are six "Sweet" varieties to choose from on the screen, probably all priced very differently�leading one to wonder, while standing uncertainly at the kiosk, what's stopping me from prodding the "Potatoes (Bulk Industrial-grade)" button and getting my onions for three cents a pound. Aside, of course, from the kiosk attendant who has to come hovering over everyone who stops by, peer over their shoulders, and point out that you can (in many cases) find a numeric code on the stickers on the vegetables which you can key in directly�which only applies to a few kinds of produce anyway. And that's not even to bring up the fact that it's terribly easy to get the machine into a state of confusion where the attendant has to come over and unjam it to get it to stop braying PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA at you even after you stuck it there and picked it up and put it firmly down several times. Or the fact that if you're at Home Depot, you're shopping so as to solve one particular home maintenance problem, and you're buying maybe five things, ten tops. But grocery shopping? Who wants to scan fifteen dog-food cans, a slab of shrink-wrapped meat, a French baguette, and forty other bits of provisions for the upcoming week�and then try to cram them all into the little weight-sensitive shelf while ten people stack up in line behind you and the kiosk attendant looks on in harried desperation? Meanwhile, what if the customer is illiterate�or just not comfortable with using the touch-screen system? It's not easy. It isn't the best designed interface in the world even when everything's running smoothly, and it involves many times the patience and concentration of the average ATM visit. Sure, if one of the regular checkout lanes is open, you can just head over there�but again, sometimes that's just not an option, because the only lane they've got open is the automated one. (And last time I was in there, two of the four stations had OUT OF ORDER signs.) Further to the Wal-Mart discussion, where the commenters point out that the dynamics of the market will determine what kind of business decisions are good for customers and which ones aren't, I cannot bring myself to give my patronage to Albertson's as long as there is this clear and obvious difference between them and Safeway, who make something of a proud point of not having automated checkout. Sure, they've got to staff more checkers; but these checkers get to use the mechanisms of the checkout counter, developed over many decades, in the manner in which they've been proven to work. And the upshot is that the shopping experience�firm peppers or no firm peppers�is vastly superior. If for no other reason than that a trained employee can process a cart full of groceries in about one tenth the time it takes me to do it myself at the automated checkout kiosk, and I'm not furious and behind schedule when I head out to the car. I feel like I've been served, not like I've been serving the company. And that's worth something to me.