Daily Canuck

Not too long ago grocery shopping was a full customer service experience. While selecting groceries you had the full service of the butcher or bakery counter while shopping. When your cart was full, the cashier rang up your groceries with a friendly attitude and the bagger carried your bags out and placed them in your car for you. It was generally a pleasant experience. However, grocery shopping is leaning more and more towards the trend of self-service. This is cutting down on their labor costs, but leaving discouraged customers.

Not only do most grocery stores have self checkout lanes installed, but they are not providing cashiers for the regular lanes so a shopper is sometimes forced to use self check-out instead of being checked out by a human being. These self-check out systems use a touch screen display to allow the customer to scan bar codes themselves. Customers are asked to manually identify items such as fruit and vegetables and place them on a device that weighs them. Then weight is then processed into a monetary amount using a price computing scale within the system. After each additional item, the user must place it on the bagging platform so that the weight can match up with what has been scanned or weighed.

In some grocery store chains such as Market Street and Central Market, there have even been price-computing scales installed throughout the store. In these cases, a customer can take the produce, olives or potato salad they want and weigh them on a scale that will convert them into price per pound and print a bar code. Then, at the self-check out lane there is no weighing and manually identifying items needed. The item will already have a barcode and can just be scanned. Some retail chains see this as improving the process of self-check out while also cutting down on labor needed to man the deli counter or prepared foods section.

While this is saving the stores money and ultimately probably cutting down on the product’s price based on less overhead, some customers do not think it is worth it. Studies have shown that it only takes one bad experience to turn a customer into a non-user of self-service checkouts. Customers that are confused and then embarrassed about the machines inability to scan their item will never use it again. There are other kinks that frustrate customers. Such as having to scan every single packet of Kool-Aid so they weight matches. Whereas, the cashier could have just scanned one and told the cash register to multiply it by 20. Coupons and loyalty card discounts are more difficult to handle in the self-service lanes. Also, while the price computing scales inside the machine can convert the weight on the scale into the price designated for the item the customer chooses on the touch screen, the customer still has to choose the correct item. If they choose bananas instead of plantains, they might get charged much less than they should.

Self-service is also starting to work it’s way into pharmacies. Med dispensing kiosks are being implemented in Canada. McDonalds is even trying to roll out a self-service order and pay machine in Europe! Even movies can be checked out in a self-service vending machine now. As each aspect of our lives moves to self-service, it leaves customers wishing for human interaction with cashiers more than ever.

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As a child going to the doctor’s office was, on the one hand, scary, but on the other quite interesting. There was always the possibility of needing to get a shot, which was the scary part, but there was also lots of interesting equipment and gadgets that you didn’t see anywhere else.

One of the things that I looked forward to was an official update on my height. As a child you can’t wait to be all grown up, and being as tall as the adults was a part of that. With every visit to the doctor’s office I would step onto the medical scales and wait while he slid the various weights back and forth until everything balanced out. The doctor would read off my weight, and then slide the attached arm up from the floor scales to measure my height. Of course, I always stood as straight and tall as I possibly could, hoping to hear a number not only bigger than the last time I was there, but bigger than the measurement from the marks we made on the door jamb at home to record my growth.

Then, the doctor would slide the blood pressure cuff over my arm and pump it up until it was tight. He’d slide the stethoscope under the cuff and listen intently as the pressure was slowly eased. “Blood pressure’s normal,” he would say, and although I had no idea what that really meant, the blood pressure cuff itself was very cool.

The doctor would use the stethoscope to listen to my heart and my lungs as I sat quietly then took a few hugely exaggerated breaths. The stethoscope was one of the most intriguing items in the doctor’s office. Not only could you use it to hear a human heart beat, but this was the main tool of the mysterious safecracker. With it, an master criminal could open any combination lock by somehow listening for the clicks and tiny noises of the tumblers.

It seemed at the time as though every visit entailed yet another vaccination. Whether it was tetanus, measles, mumps, or some other dread malady, a big needle was the universal preventative measure. On the one hand, I was curious enough to want to look, but somehow it seemed to hurt less if I didn’t. Either way, my arm would be sore for a couple of days afterward. Of course, getting a shot at the doctor’s also meant getting a lollipop. They always said that you would get a lollipop if you didn’t cry when you they gave you the shot, but I don’t think I ever saw a kid who didn’t get a lollipop afterwards, whether he cried or not.

Of course, the most magical piece of equipment was the X-ray machine. This device could take pictures of the skeleton that was inside us all. Often there would be X-ray photos on the doctor’s office walls and as I waited for the doctor, I’d scan them carefully looking to see if I could spot a broken bone.

Everything from the medical scales to the lollipops to the X-rays made a trip to the doctor’s a wondrous event for a young preschool child. Now, as I head into middle age, it seems that there isn’t so much a sense of wonder, though the trepidation still remains.

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