You would think that if any retailer had a sophisticated, user-friendly, bug-free self-check out system, it would be Wal-Mart, the biggest freaking retailer in the world. But you’d be wrong.

Their self-check out system is the buggiest one I’ve ever seen, at least my first experience with it was. I scanned an electric razor, put it in the bag. The razor did scan and showed up on the screen, but when I put it in the bag, the system said “Unauthorized item in bag.” This led to me attempting to void the razor and to try re-ringing it. But, if you void an item, this requires supervisor approval.

This leads to another problem with Wal-Mart. These self-check out things are supposed to have an employee supervising the check out lanes, so that if a customer needs assistance, they can come help. At Wal-Mart, however, there was no employee to be seen, and it took someone like five minutes to come over to help me out.

After she fixed the problem, when I went to scan the razor again, it was fine, but I had to demagnetize the anti-theft device. The problem now was that the demagnetizing strip was *right next* to the scanner, so when I tried to demag the anti-theft, it scanned the razor *two more times* requiring yet more supervisor intervention.

Of course, all this could have been easily avoided if *any* of the multitude of open lanes was an express lane. Hell, not even the self-check out lanes were express–I was waiting in line for quite a while even there, because a woman had a cart full of clothes. (I had three items.)

Conclusion: Wal-Mart evil.

In other retail bitching news: why is it that when the weather turns cold, and the snow starts to fall, every store in the area *always* runs out of rock salt (chemical de-icer). Home Depot didn’t have any; Wal-Mart didn’t have any. But two stores is my limit; I’m not going to hunt around for it any more than that. Come to think of it, no one ever has any snowblowers around this time of year either; a couple years ago, I ordered one online, because I couldn’t find any locally. What, do you have a buy a snow blower in the freaking *summer*? What happened to the laws of supply and demand? When demand is high, shouldn’t your supply be high?