Reid About It

My local Wal-Mart now has those automated check-out lines, where you go through, you run your groceries across the scanner, you sack them, you pay for them, and then you take them out to the parking lot. What a great idea this is! I was so thrilled to get that "working at Wal-Mart experience," when I was finished, I stocked the shelves in housewares and then mopped the cosmetics aisles before rounding up the buggies in the parking lot on the way to my car.

The people these stores hire to check out your items are paid by the company, and most of the time, they still don't have any idea how to do it correctly. Why should I have to do their work for them?

I figure Wal-Mart thinks if they can just get us to ring our own groceries up, they can fire the rest of the night shift, replace them with underage illegal aliens smuggled in from Cambodia as indentured servants to the Sam Walton Foundation For Global Economic Control, and then generate nothing but profit.

Something else I've noticed about Wal-Mart. Leaving aside the stylistic irony of a poor white trash bottom dollar seller mentality store like Wal-Mart actually selling jewelry, have you ever noticed the security at the store? If you wanted to steal jewelry from Wal-Mart, you're much better off waiting until someone buys it, then clocking them while they're trying to find their keys in the parking lot. They've got ten times as many cameras focused on their cheap jewelry counter as they do on your car in the dark of the lot.