Tag App

Shop With An Opp, Err, App

Michael 2 Comments

Just one blog post ago I said how sometimes I can appreciate some mobile based applications like the daily paper. Sometimes I am quite content with the old fashion ways like the Sunday paper. Today I tried a new phone app and I might not ever go back to my previous routine. Today I shopped, scanned, and bagged my way through the grocery store.

Ok, I know some of you are already saying that you don’t even want to use the self-checkout. “If I wanted to check out groceries I would have gotten a job at the grocery store!” and “I don’t see anybody giving out discounts for doing their job!” are just a couple of the reasons I’ve heard people give for not embracing self-checkout. Sometimes while in line for self-checkout. And that’s fine. As far as I know, no store has demanded that you have to check yourself out. At least not ones with a brick and mortar presence. They still have cashiers manning the scanner and till and you are welcome to use those lanes if you want somebody else to do the hard work.

I sometimes had problems with self-checkout at the grocery store. Often it was because of a person attempting to use the self-checkout who had difficulty completing the basic “pass bar code over scanner, put on belt or in bag” motion. Rarely was it the technology itself although the express, 12 items or less, self-checkout registers never understood that I wanted to use my own bag even though they gave me that option at the start of the process. A human was always able to provide some intervention and I moved right along.

The “Scan, Pay, and Go” option as my local market has dubbed the service, cuts the most annoying of the limitations of the self-checkout and still gives me the opportunity to shop in non-contact bliss. The process is simple. You download an app to your smart phone or use a provided hand held scanner. Instead of just placing an item into your cart, you scan the product’s bar code and put it into bag in your cart. And you continue through the store completing your shopping list like so. For security reasons you don’t put any payment information into the app and you pay at the end of the shopping experience. At the checkout area you proceed to an area just for the “Scan, Pay, and Go” crowd and scan the bar code on to the checkout stand which retrieves your order. You are given the option to redeem coupons and select payment method, then off you go.

It might not be for everybody. Some people might want even more automation. But for an old guy like me, it’s nice to have done something relevant to the 21st century. Finally.

I can’t wait till next week’s shipping trip.

 

 

 

 

 

Just Because You Can

Michael 5 Comments

This morning Best Buy announced they will no longer sell CDs in their stores. Vinyl yes, polycarbonate no. Apparently those who had normally opted for the shiny discs are now more likely to download or stream music to their hand held devices.

Last week the local paper announced that in August they will be dropping the print version of the paper from seven days a week to five. Apparently everybody wants their news electronically. This particular paper has not only its news website but two different apps for reading on mobile devices.

When Apple told us they had just the thing for that (with their trademarked and copywrited slogan (copywrit? copywrote?)), did they know they would release an app to reduce mobile dependency 9 years later? In fact, their app for that is only the latest in a string of such aids to reduce our electronic jonesing.

No, I’m not going to embark on a rampage decrying the ever presence of mobile devices in people’s hands. For the most part, I personally would rather hold a paper in my hands for perusal, especially now that they’ve resolved the inky finger problem, and though I never really got the hang of transferring a song from “somewhere out there” to what I still call “the phone,” I think we’ve done well in miniaturizing and availing technology to the masses. Even I am more likely to read the morning paper on my tablet out on the patio and I actually have a collection of favorites in my music folder in “the phone” (thanks to the daughter’s doing). Still, there are some things that shouldn’t completely replace the older hard copy iterations.

TriptikFor example, if you have a cell phone any less than say six years old you likely have a GPS mapping program at your fingertips. When I was traveling for work I appreciated my locating and traffic apps. I’d step out of an airport that looked quite like the airport I departed from, got into a rental car that look quite like the one I returned in a city earlier, and navigate to a hospital that looked suspiciously like one I visited the previous day on roads that held no resemblance to anywhere I’d even been. Yet I never got lost. My “phone” always knew where I was and which way to go.

But even knowing exactly where I was I never had a sense of roughly where I was. Years ago I’d use AAA “Triptiks” to navigate to a specific place. They were flip chart looking collections of mini-maps that specified your travel along highlighted roads. But I also always had my guidebooks and atlas so that at stops I could get a feel for what lay beyond the margins of the designated route. How else could you know that the world’s largest ball of twine was just 50 miles around the next bend, a drop in the mileage bucket when you’re already 1800 miles from home? You don’t get that from GPS.

So although I hope atlases never go away and that I’ll always have a CD player in my car so I have something to listen to while I search for the second largest cactus shaped like a tea pot, I can still appreciate the electronic versions. Now if only the proponents of those would please leave my paper and plastic alone we can live together in peace.

 

Head Buds

Michael Leave a comment

Sometimes a mind is a terrible thing to have. I don’t even know how I got started thinking about this but once I did there just was no stopping it. It had a life of its own and it must have been as crappy a life as I have because of all the people in the world it could hang out with, that person was me.

“It” is my mind and I know your own mind usually doesn’t get to choose from many people to hang out with, but still. It started while I was at dialysis yesterday, when I usually read or work a crossword puzzle or two, I felt like doing something else. Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of something elses to pick from there. Watch TV. No. Pull out the tablet and scroll through some social media. No. Watch YouTube. No. As long as the tablet was out I thought I’d plug in to some music and I plugged in my ear buds. And there we were. Off and running!

What a strange term that is. Earbuds. When I was in school we called the little speaker you connected to the transistor radio that you sneaked into class so you could listen to the baseball game an ear phone. Then we graduated to listening to rock and roll on our stereos at home and to not disturb Dad was sleeping after working night shift, we shifted to headphones. I guess if we had used earbuds back then their bigger cousins would have been called head buds.

Now that was good enough for a mental chuckle but could “it” stop there? Oh no. (Yeah, I know for the vast majority of the world including parts that might still be uninhabited, that barely registers on the “hmmmm scale” let alone warranted a chuckle, but when Transistoryou’re entering your third hour of dialysis you get a warped sense of reality let alone chuckleworthiness.) So “it” decided to keep on going. Does anybody still listen to baseball on radio? I don’t. Sometimes I might watch it on television but even in the car I don’t listen to baseball. Even in a car I rarely listen to hockey. But that’s not a good example since I’m usually at the home games and watching the away games on TV. As much as I complain about having to listen to national play by play and threaten to mute the television so I could listen to the local broadcast on radio I never have. And I actually have a radio in the apartment. Two. One is attached to an alarm clock that I’ve had for at least 30 years that I last used as an alarm at least 20 years ago. The other is attached to a CD player. I don’t listen to that much anymore either. Radio? Wow. I know they still make radio. You can get many of your local stations on your handy dandy I Heart Radio app.

Fortunately, for as long as it took me to put all of that into some coherent form, dialysis was over and I didn’t have to listen to “it” any longer. Or at least any longer just then. But I know some day this week though I’m going to have a dream about head buds. I can’t wait to see what they look like.