Conclusion

Part 5 – Conclusion

The incidents I’ve written about this week have become part of our every day life.  These kinds of things are normal in the society we live in.  Do we choose to accept this as normal, become complacent and accept that the world is what it is?  I remember a time in my life that I would have handled each of these incidents in a much different way than I did.

è    The boy in the parking lot who chose to take his penis out in a public area to pee should have been confronted.  My husband would have confronted him, but we discussed it briefly and after weighing the pros and cons, decided it would be better to not engage the situation.  He could have had a gun in the SUV, we didn’t know if he was psycho or just plain disrespectful.  These are things to think about before any type of response to a situation is made.

è    The kissing girls were not worth the effort it would have taken to confront them.  People that don’t have enough respect for themselves are not going to respect anyone criticizing them, constructively or not.  Unfortunately there are too many of these types of people in the world and you just have to decide how you want to deal with their ignorance.

è    The deceitful meat is one issue I am having a hard time accepting.  Trickery by supermarkets to consumers has probably been going on for a long time.  It seems like now we are being made more aware of it.  It will get worse based on supply and demand.  The container size shrinks while the price stays the same or goes up.  Some super centers are changing packaging to increase sales.  My thought is they are covering up the poorly made product to make the consumer think they are buying a new improved product.

è    The self-check-out is the luck of the draw.  Do not put your faith in technology and computers.  They were created by humans and humans are not flawless. 

I believe in absolutes.  I believe there is a right way and there is a wrong way.  I believe people have been lead astray for so long that they don’t know the difference between what is right and what they think is right.  I believe too many people have grown weary and tired of fighting the good fight.  They lay down and are complacent to let things be the way they are instead of standing up for what is right.  There are absolute truths and absolute rights just like there are absolute lies and absolute wrongs.  If we don’t take a stand for them, what good are they?

The society and the world are ever changing.  Rules change, regulations change, people change, for the good as well as for the bad.  One thing that never changes is God.  He is the same today as He was yesterday and He will be the same tomorrow. Take a stand and do what is right.  Everyone has the knowledge.  Don’t ignore it when it speaks.

Repent!  For the kingdom of heaven is at hand!  Matthew 3:2.  We need to change our attitude and our outlook on the way we look at things.  Reversing our thinking is life changing.  Instead of reacting to bad circumstances, we need to take a minute, look at the situation and respond in a way that helpful, not only to us, but perhaps to the other party.  Just remember, the ignorant are ignorant of their ignorance.   

© Crackerberries 2013

Self-Check-Out

Part 4

We try to consolidate and only do grocery shopping twice a month to save money by not purchasing more than we need.  We go to the super center where we can expediently obtain everything we need in one convenient stop.  This is a story about our last adventure of shopping.  We had a long list of items so we used the rest rooms before we got started.  Both the men and the women’s rest rooms needed serious attention.  This was early in the day on a Saturday morning. 

It took us over an hour to locate everything we needed.  A lot of this had to do with the fact that a lot of the shelves were not stocked (confectioner’s sugar, razor blades, mozzarella cheese, to list a few) and we had to ask or wait for someone to bring them out from the warehouse.  I consider this a bit unusual for mid-morning on a Saturday. 

As we made our way to the check out lines, we saw that there were five out of twenty registers opened.  We proceeded to one of the self-check-out registers.  I prefer to bag my own groceries, so it worked out well.  We spent another forty-five minutes or so, scanning, waiting for the attendant to push buttons when the computer voice instructed us to “please place item in the bagging area,” and bagging and loading the groceries back into the cart. 

We had four items left which were price match items.  This meant the attendant was needed.  We pushed the call button and a few minutes later a young woman came to assist us.  The first two items were carrots and cucumbers and she did the price override and put them in the bag.  The next item was sweet potatoes.  When she put them on the scale something malfunctioned.  She pounded the buttons and then put her hands on the scale and rested with her head down, for several minutes. 

We weren’t sure if she was having a nervous breakdown or just crying.  Finally I asked her what the problem was.  She began to push buttons again and said something inaudible and again with her head down, and hands resting on the scale, not talking, not doing anything for several minutes.  She did this one more time before a patron in need of assistance with her self-check-out came over and asked for her help.  As the cashier went to assist the other patron, she screamed, “Bobby!” right in front of us to help.

Ten minutes passed and finally “Bobby" A.K.A. Jerry Garcia, the store manager showed up.  Okay, it really wasn’t Jerry, but he had a long, gray braid and I could have sworn he was wearing a tie-dye tee shirt.  He started pounding on the buttons and plugged some gadget into the scanner.  After pressing buttons for a couple of minutes, he told the cashier she would have to re-scan everything.  He never spoke to us once.  We had been in the store for two hours and fifteen minutes at this point.  She called us over to a little quick check out and says, “Pass me the stuff and I’ll scan it.”

Excuse me, but you’ve got to be joking?  Pass you the stuff?  Are you serious?

Apparently they couldn’t override the computer to get the items we had already scanned into the system to go over to her register.  It was as if we were starting over with our check out as they all needed to be rescanned in order for us to check out.  Instead of going to a regular register and putting the groceries on a belt and scanning them in a neat and orderly fashion, we stood at this little quick check out passing one item at a time out of the bags to the cashier to scan and repacking into the bags.  We had 107 items. 

While she was scanning the items there was a young man standing their conversing with her and making comments about the items we were purchasing the whole time.  At the end, there was no apology for the inconvenience.   It was quite the adventure.

© Crackerberries 2013