A few days ago I was in the Disco supermarket here (yes, the one with the shopping cart idiocy), and was surprised to see that they’ve installed four self-checkout stations. This is old stuff up north, but not thirty years old as the Uruguay jokes go, so maybe the country is catching up faster?
When I went to the wait-for-a-number cashiers, I noticed there were six (seven?) instead of the previous four. Well, that’s good. Except the new number-display is farther away and the numbers appear to be smaller. I couldn’t make out which cashier to go to. No problem; the appropriate cashier waved his arm. He also thought it was amusing.
I asked him when all of this happened.
“Two days ago,” he told me.
Which pretty much explains why nobody was using them.
Fast forward to this morning — Christmas Eve, and the predictable jam-packed shopping crowd — and suddenly quite a few people thought these were an OK idea. Myself included.
