This is what happens when you try to “save” money by forcing people to use self-checkout.
I will more than happily use self checkouts over waiting for a cashier, we only have so much time in this life and i refuse to waste it standing in line.
Maybe, but technically the company is getting free labour out of you. if you are fine with your labour being free then continue on and enjoy
Ist shopping on the sales floor free labor. Back when you would hand your shopping list to a worker and the would give you all your stuff. (funny enough online pickup has kinda brought that back). Things change over time
As someone else mentioned doing online pickup forces them to hire staff. I don’t mind wandering because sometimes I’m not buying, I’m comparing etc. But eliminating 10 cashiers to have customers scan their own, only helps the corporations steal more money from workers.
As far as I’m concerned time is worth far more than money, money only has value because people give it value.
This. And the same goes for work in general. Doing work only has value because we attached money to it. People saying that scanning your own 10 items at the grocery store is labor and you should be paid accordingly… I’ll always respect peoples’ opinions and values, but something has to give if we feel as a society that that is worth compensation.
That is to say, the free labor for the corporations is not lost on me, I’m just thinking bigger picture. The budding socio-anarchist in me wants to burn the system to the ground and watch what rebuilds.
We were doomed from the start, damn those dank river valleys for establishing commerce and social hierarchy!
do the order online thing(for anything that’s not fresh product), so they have to hire people do the shopping, scan, and bag/box and you just go pick up. (it’s mostly free atm for pick ups just need to be above certain amount of dollar spent.) So you go, buy fresh product, then go pick up the bagged ones.
Good plan actually. However I noticed the store here has different prices online vs instore, they have a built in markup online.
I’ve never seen security gates (at least anything more than the basic magnetic beeping ones), but locking shopping carts are a must. Hundreds or even thousand dollar equipment get stolen even a few times a year can seriously hurt a store’s viability, and I used to see stolen carts everywhere before locking wheels were invented. Half the time, it wasn’t even to be used personally, but because someone just wanted to use the cart to carry their groceries all the way home, then dumped the cart on the side of the road to rot afterwards, only to do it again the next week. This extreme was not common, but I did see it as a child.
And at my store, security guards have become mandatory, if only to protect against stealing beer. I think the guards catch a dozen people trying every week. When they were fired hired, I heard a story that most of the people they caught weren’t even homeless. One of them was a pensioner who was doing it only for fun. Some old woman who wanted the adrenaline rush because she was plenty wealthy, but bored.
On the flip side, they generally ignore regular shoplifting as long as the product isn’t expensive, and I’ve heard one guy who grabbed a shoplifter, only to take out the beer and leave the food in the guy’s bag after kicking him out of the store.
There are serious issues going around, but putting the blame purely on corporate greed is unfair, as they’re not the reason why there’s so many desperate people about these last few years.
People need to stop shopping at Loblaws owned chains. I know it’s difficult because they own practically everything.
I don’t know how much better it is but I’ve been mostly patronizing my local Food Basics, with the occasional trip to Walmart and Costco for things they don’t carry at FB. I avoid the Loblaws’ chains after it became obvious they were doing the biggest price-hikes to drive inflation while Food Basics was raising wages and giving more of their employees full-time benefits.
I realize that Walmart is ethically a damned sight worse, but one battle at a time. Walmart doesn’t give a shit what their Canadian customer-base does they’re a global company. Loblaws lives and dies by it.
I’ve been doing the same. Its a slightly longer walk to food basics than the nearest loblaws chain but it is worth it. I get paper wasting flyers for both stores in my mail every week and everytime the food basics flyer offers better prices for the same foods like produce or meats.
The reason they aren’t responding on social media is they recently fired a friend of mine who worked as their social media manager. She was the only person I know who refused to say anything negative about Galen Weston. I personally think they’re adopting a policy of ignoring everything the public says about them and fucking us all as hard as they can until the government steps in. Stop giving them your money!
I went over to my local Loblaws today and while they had added a gate at the store entrance right after the second automatic doors, now they added ANOTHER gate BEFORE those doors. What’s next, a moat with sharks? Holy shit.
