I give you http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/photos/
If that doesn’t float your boat, here is a complete, unedited, copied and pasted quote from Zerohedge
“I have a friend who is a department manager at Walmart. He and the other two department managers for that department have no employees. 80% of the employees are cashiers. I point you to JCPenney and their decision to go to RFID chips, and reassigned all of their cashiers.
In five years Walmart will not be the biggest private employer in the U.S., but they will be doing just fine. I’ll let you figure out why.”
The guy is right, this is what the world has come to, a store department with three managers and zero employees, and it takes me straight back to documentaries made in 1976 about computerisation and the word processor wiping out the thing known as the typing pool…. buggy whip manufacturers indeed.
You also have to remember that all three “managers” are in fact in reality no more than the most menial of clerks with no discretion or authority, just a job title, Orlando style.
You can go to my local supermarket and there is an analogy to the proper turner in the shop replaced by one guy manning six CNC tools, there is one chick manning 8 self service tills, every time a customer tries to scan both bags of sugar before putting the first one into the weighed tray, or when central programming gets the weight of an item wrong so when you do scan and put it in the bag in the weighed tray it throws up an error.
If you stick with standardised and bar-coded items, coffee, milk, sugar, washing up liquid, it works well, hell it beats the fucking tills with queues of obese wimminz, plus it has the advantage that if the system fucks with you or falls over, just walk away and leave that shit there, that’s the bit the programmers always forget, a human can walk away from a robot mid-sentence… of course the bit the human’s always forget is that machines and computers can be programmed to be sociopathic towards you.
Take the example of petrol pumps, the law states that when they say they have dispensed a gallon of fuel, they can not under read by more than a fixed amount.
Say for example that the law says a pump cannot under dispense by more than 1.5%
Say for example (I’ll use metric cos it is easier) the tanker delivers 10,000 litres of fuel to the filling station, that means that the pumps are allowed to dispense a displayed volume of 10,150 litres, given that it is child’s play to make a pump that meters accurately to 0.1% this means they can deliberately set every pump in the land to under dispense by 1.4%, on every fill up, for every vehicle.
This is a simple example of a simple mechanical machine that has been set up to steal 1.4% of your billed amount, every single transaction.
Back in the day you could use a CB “burner”, which might make the pump money display freeze, or scream through to 99.99
Your domestic electric and gas meters are the same deal BTW
By the time you get to advanced electronic self service POS, and more importantly the supermarket full of products designed to be compatible with same, you get screwed left right and centre, by design, by the programmed to screw you sociopathic machine.
Suddenly things like apples and oranges and cucumbers get sold by quantity, not weight, and it is only when you get back home that you realise that back when you used to buy by weight from that same supermarket a bucks worth of apples used to full the fruit bowl on the dining table, and now you are buying individually the 8 apples it takes to fill the bowl are now a buck and a quarter, or local currency equivalent.
Suddenly, you’re buying the barcode, and getting for free the product attached to the barcode, and next thing you know you are being eased into the so called “multiple micro-transaction” model, which isn’t so micro… a minimum of 10% of shoppers at my local mart have already been programed to;
- Pay for their groceries with the plastic at 14:04 hrs
- Pay for their smokes with the plastic on the way out to the car at 14:10 hrs
- Pay for their fuel for the car with the plastic (pumps set 1.4% under) at 14:19 hrs
Three transactions in 15 minutes at the same store in the same visit on the same plastic, and of course you are getting nickel and dimed at every step, and that is BEFORE you get talked into any of the options such as “cash back” at the till and so on.
Of course, as the IQ required by the customers drops, so does the IQ required by the staff.
IN shades of the Stainless Steel Rat, it is an ill wind that blows no good… I found myself wanting some 15″ diameter analogue wall clocks, the store had some on offer, seriously cheap, but the advantage is you go on with a good AA battery and a nearly flat AA battery which you palm, cos a nearly flat AA battery makes a clock mechanism / second hand jerk, but not advance, and you buy one “good” clock for 5.99 and get two “broken” ones for free after showing the department “manager” (see above) the broken stock… three clocks at 2.00 a pop.
It would be illegal to swap bar-codes on items, or to not swipe items, you could do both these things and get away with it, with some finesse, but they are both illegal and it just isn’t worth it, especially not for some product that costs 3.99…
But it is not illegal to game the system, by doing things the programmers never expected you to do, it is not illegal to take the 1 Kg bag of sugar and place it FIRMLY in the weight tray / bag after scanning, say 2 Kg firmly for a second or two… it is not illegal to wear a relatively large rare earth magnet in a wrist strap… it is not illegal to not know the difference between one variety of apple and another, and constantly ask the assistant for help… nor is it illegal to, as I saw on my last visit, wear a bracelet with a pendant with a bar-code enamelled onto it, which they only spotted when the security guard noticed that the “Error, call assistant” only came up when the customer tried to scan stuff with her left hand, the arm with the pendant.
RFID / NFC / NFC+bump etc is the appropriate technology to move us from where we are, to a real multiple micro transaction scenario where we can REALLY get nickel and dimed.
Which is great, until “Fred” comes along, Fred is as crazy as batshit, Fred was so convinced that all the RF pollution was fucking up his brain waves that he went out and bought a pocket size jammer from Asia, now he says he is much better, while being bathed in his own RF pollution…. I saw Fred this morning, buying his smokes (yeah, go figure) and the usual passer by looking at their phone quizzically and shouting HELLO!!!! ARE YOU THERE? at it, seems Fred decided to buy a new pair of trainers / sneakers, apparently he had a hell of a time, because the room temperature IQ staff were unable to just wave the RFID tagged product at the POS unit, and had to type in a 16 digit number by hand, which took about three attempts.
Fred didn’t make the connection, beyond “All this fuckin’ technology man….”
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