Friday December 7th 2018
The upward trend on the weather roller coaster continued today. It was another sunny day with a temperature around seventy five. That is about a five degree improvement over yesterday. The temperature is forecast to continue to climb tomorrow, but the full sunshine is not expected.
After yesterday’s high level of activity touring the Animal Kingdom, today was dedicated to more mundane tasks like grocery shopping. I went to the Walmart near the center of Clermont. Unfortunately it is doing a lot of pick up business. People that use this service do all of their shopping online then just come to the store to pick it up. Walmart staff with large rolling carts with blue baskets go up and down the aisles filling the orders. They take up more space than a normal shopping cart making it hard to navigate around them. When you throw in electric convenience vehicles, walkers and more than an average number of shoppers it’s a real chore.
The other downside of the pickup service for those of shopping in the store is the lack of staff at the registers. They all seem to be in the aisles. There were only about five registers staffed by real people. The rest were self service. The people picking up groceries don’t pay anything extra, but Walmart wants in store shoppers to do the work of scanning and bagging. It doesn’t seem right. I have plenty of time so I waited in one of the lines with a real person doing the scanning and bagging.
This particular clerk wasn’t the best. Anything out of the ordinary really phased her. An open bag of tomatoes caused a few minutes delay as she tried to figure out if she should weight them or call for a replacement bag. The customer ended up not buying them. The next customer had two transactions. One for his own groceries and another for a non-profit. It took her several tries to enter the tax free transaction information. Then it was my turn. She was bagging items without making sure the scanner got them. I tried to be a good guy and point it out, but she didn’t get it or didn’t care. Reviewing the receipt after I got home it looks like I didn’t get charged for three items totaling about five dollars.
