On Saturday we wandered out to one of the local grocery stores for a few items. Having filled the cart, we proceeded to checkout. As we put our items on the belt, the cashier swiped a carton of Newman's Own Lemonade across the scanner for the lady in front of us. BEEP! Rejected. BEEP! Rejected. She stopped, looked at the offending item and tried one more time. BEEP! Rejected.
Calling a manager for assistance, she said "The scanner isn't registering this item" and handed it to him. He tried a couple of times before announcing "I'll go and check it." Off he went. We waited. Approximately five minutes with still no return, we were joking that the refrigeration units had swallowed him and he was never coming back. At the same time we were invited by a neighboring cashier to bring our items one register over to complete check out.
As we started check out in the next lane, our intrepid manager returned with a duplicate carton of Lemonade. Scan...BEEP! Rejected again! At this point, completely perplexed, he offered what I affectionately call a "BFO," or Brilliant Flash of the Obvious, by announcing to the lady who wanted to purchase the product that they could not get a price, because it would not scan. She told them not to concern themselves with it and move on.
Said manager then promptly picked up his Motorola radio and called to the back. "The Newman's Own Lemonade isn't registering on the scanners, you have to pull all the product from the shelves."
I stopped. WHAT??? Had I heard this guy correctly? They were going to pull fifty or so cartons of lemonade because the price couldn't be scanned at checkout? I waited a moment. Sure enough, that was the plan.
I was aghast! The term "Mindless Drones" jumped to the forefront of my brain. Here was the perfect example of the human race relying solely on technology to accomplish their mission. Technology failed to recognize the product. Why did this happen? In all likelihood...simple human error. Someone forgot to input the SKU of this product into the system. Thus, the Drones, unable to rub two brain cells together, shut down. No one thought, "Hey, I'll go back to the cooler, get the price, grab a bunch of sticky notes, scribble down the information and post it at each register. That way, if a customer wants it, we can accommodate their purchase and sell the lemonade by inputting the price manually." A quick fix/solution until such time as the stores system can be updated. Instead, they choose to lose money (albeit, not great amounts in the grand scheme of things...but that's not the point) by pulling all the product.
I am not a Luddite. Far from it. I embrace technology and use it to my advantage at every possible opportunity. Should that technology glitch or fail for some reason, my whole world does not crumble, I don't freeze like a deer in the headlights and my synapses don't overload and kick off line. I increase the cycles of the OODA Loop, attempt to come up with a fix and more often than not, am successful.
This was a simple fix, yet the humans failed miserably. It was embarrassing to see. Instead of engaging that supposedly superior gray matter known as the brain and overriding the technology, they allowed the technology to control them.
We're supposedly the top of the food chain on this planet. I think not.
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