4 ms·

America is so weird looking at it from the outside. I have thankfully never run into locked up things like toothpaste in my life. That seems oddly oddly weird

• JumpCrisscross 2y ago
  > America is so weird looking at it from the outside America is also diverse. My New York CVS locks up toothpaste while the Duane Reade up the street leaves almost everything in the open. Meanwhile, my small-town Wyoming target leaves expensive electronics in the open because it’s a town where folks feel comfortable leaving their keys in their car (and rarely lock their doors).
  • Vaslo 2y ago
    Your comment makes a lot of sense, though “diverse” is definitely a euphemism in this case.
    • s1artibartfast 2y ago
      I'm struggling to understand what the euphemism would be
• nonameiguess 2y ago
  In line with CrissCross's comment, it's important to remember the Internet is also huge. There are probably millions of American who visit Hacker News on at least some semi-regular basis. Even if you see 20 of them in one thread all saying they experienced the same thing, that doesn't make it typical. Who decides to comment isn't some kind of scientific sampling process. I've been an American for over 44 years and lived in 12 different states and have never seen toothpaste locked up in a store.
• lm28469 2y ago
  > America is so weird looking at it from the outside. In Germany we have self checkout lanes, they're closed 90% of the time even when the queue is 50m long, and when they're open you have 1 employee for every 3 stations + one employee at the gate. Once you're done paying you have to carry your receipt to the gate and scan it otherwise it doesn't open Every time I go through that I wonder what the fuck went wrong in this world, this is something you have to go through every day in the so called #1 economy of europe... none of it makes sense, you're a thief by default, you pay the same price even though you do the job. And it's at least 2x slower because there is always a problem (alcohol/cigarettes needs a manual approval of an employee, if the weight doesn't match the machine locks up and need the approval of an employee, if the scanner is fucked you have to enter the 200 characters bar code manually in the machine, &c.)
  • metalman 2y ago
    Last year I switched to cash only(Canada), this week had to think for a moment to remember my PIN. The self checkout's are horrible, and de-huminising, and just now it occured to me to start calling them the "self abuse line". Going to cash has also prompted me to be more frugal, and buy bulk, single ingredients for cooking meals, as I think there is something in the monkey brain that is reluctant to hand anything over for nothing much in return.And hefting many packaged items(and putting them back) reveals that they are shiny boxes full of air,described as bieng mega something with enhanced nutrition(pro), but true costs are $60+/kg for some bland food substitute pellets, that have 72 different ingedients, written out in a micro font, that must require special printing equipment to produce. What is fun at the cashier checkout, is handing them the correct amount, and watching the robo-human employee flounder, some (get it) and smile after a second, but others are clearly freaked out by a spontainoius demonstration of minor mental arithmatic combined with physical money.
• thejazzman 2y ago
  That isn't "America", that's major cities like San Francisco and New York City. It's nothing like that in even smaller cities, let alone the majority of the country being towns and what not
• nozzlegear 2y ago
  America is huge. I've never been to a store that had things locked up as described here. If I need to buy toothpaste or whatever, I can just pop into my town's pharmacy; grocery store; one of the dollar stores; or one of the gas stations, and just grab it off the shelves, pay at the cashier or self-checkout, and be gone in a couple minutes.
• stcroixx 2y ago
  This really only happens in states where the majority of residents share an ideology that criminals shouldn't be held responsible for their actions.
• catlover76 2y ago
  [dead]