h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The self-service tills only work if you have bags of no weight whatsoever, which is useless as if I'm outside then I usually have my backpack, which contains a selection of things I'll find useful when outside my house. But if you put the backpack on the scales and press 'brought own bag' the checkouts declare it is an unexpected item.

<BB<

Some supermarkets now have reusable mesh bags for fruit and veg. Once the bag is scanned at the self service till it has to stay in the bagging area. This means it has to be emptied of its fruit or vegetables. Only after the fruit or vegatables are weighed can they be added once more to the mesh bag. Its not exactly an efficient system.

People absolutely hide items with out "beeping" them. It's so bad, several large retailers (in the US) like Target & Walmart are cutting back on their self serve checkouts because of rising costs of theft.

Things may be a little bit different here. You bleep the items from your basket to your own bag. Fruit and veg that needs weighing can be weighed separately to get a barcode sticker. Bakery items with a piece price have a lookup table.

And yes, people steal stuff around here as well. Recently, someone got caught paying just one item out of 1000 euros in groceries. If you just forget one item, you will be listed but you will be banned only after multiple fails. This brings me to another

PH: supermarkets where the price on the till is higher than advertised in the shop. Independent research has shown that this is so common that it is hard to believe it is an error.

The scan as you go has shown that more carrots are sold than the shop has in stock, whereas the expensive veg stay on the shelves...

I hate having a service check - they only scan a few items in each of my bags, but somehow they manage to upset my carefully packed arrangement. Because I reuse bags, they managed to scan an old sticker once. When I pointed that out, they had to start all over again.

New PH: I'm happy to 'manage my account' online - when there's actually a webpage to do it. Spent ages looking for one on Octopus. Emailing them, got a speedy response but was sent a weblink which took me to an empty page. No response since.