Idea Sheet
Posted by admin on December 12, 2021 Prep | | No commentsLazy Christmas Decorations – I believe that inflatable Christmas decorations are the laziest of Christmas decorations. The blow up Santa or Santa Mickey or Holiday Yoda. Lazy. Lazy. Lazy. I can say this because I utilize three in my front yard; an aforementioned Santa, Frosty and the legs of an elf. You place him in a bush, upside down, and he appears to be stuck. Cute, right?
We have one house in the neighborhood that has no less than a dozen inflatable decorations. No other lights or anything just the inflatables. Lazy. I will defend myself in saying that I have a ton of lights strung. I even risked life and limb by wrapping two royal palms…thirty feet up. The inflatables are there to accent the rest of the decorations.
What parts of Christmas are you just lazy about? What parts do you, maybe, take way too seriously?
Is the person responsible for decorating lazy about it? My favorite is the one string of lights on the apartment balcony. Like the person who lives there spent $2.99 on lights at Walmart. They came home went to the balcony, turned around, closed their eyes and tossed the lights over their head like a bouquet at a wedding ceremony. Where they landed is where they sit…probably until mid-February.
Also, What’s the most creative decoration set up you’ve seen? I saw the Santa Yoda with a light saber and he’s fully inflated. All of the other holiday inflatables are not. They’re strewn across the lawn; flat and lifeless. I thought that was clever.
Self-Checkout – Someone put up a post on Facebook about Walmart self-checkout. She bought her items and headed for the door. As you know, Walmart employees a receipt-checker. Most times, it’s no biggie. They glance at the receipt. Glance in the cart and move you along. Sometimes, however, you get the overly ambitious receipt checker who mucks up the works and, although, you’ve paid for everything, you have to sit behind other people waiting to prove that you’re not a thief.
The woman in question, skipped the line and just kept going. The receipt-checker yelled out, “Ma’am?” to know avail. In the post the woman said, “Look, either you’re going to trust us with self-checkout or you’re not.”
First, let me say, I never hassle the receipt-checkers until they start interrogating me. Prime example: I bought a couple of two liter bottles of Sunkist. It’s a 7-Up brand. The receipt claims I bought 7-Up. So, homie is looking through my cart, thinking that I stole the Sunkist. I had to explain to him why it was like that on the receipt. By now, there’s six other people with full carts behind me.
Do you just skip past the receipt-checker?” I mean, really, what are they going to do, chase you into the parking lot to make sure you didn’t steal a loaf of bread? I have to believe at the corporate level, there’s a trade-off, right? They’re going to save a bunch of money in not paying cashiers in exchange for a low wage receipt checker and the realization that there will be an uptick in shrinkage. They have to do whatever they can to stop as much shoplifting as they can.
If the line is longish, I just keep going. They have a right to check the receipt, I get it but it’s not a law, right? I can’t be punished for exiting the store with the items I paid for.
Shoplifter or No? – Kind of a related subject. I went through the Walmart checkout. Scanned and paid. I try to use as few plastic bags as possible, so boxes of cereal, milk, soda are typically just sitting in the cart with the bagged up items. Now, this will guarantee you will be halted by the receipt-checker.
In this case, there was not someone checking receipts at the door. I get to the car, put the groceries in the trunk. I start heading home and realize, “Oh, shit! I didn’t scan the eggs.” I, basically, stole a dozen eggs from Walmart. Or did I?
What’s the ruling on this? I’m already half way home. Am I required to ferry the eggs all the way back to the store and pay for them? Walk in, alert an employee and say, “I mistakenly did not pay for these eggs.” If not, am I a shoplifter? Am I allowed a day of grace and pay for the eggs upon my next visit? Or, if it was accidental, it’s a “my bad” moment and there’s no real obligation to pay for the eggs because you didn’t intend on “stealing” them?
Am I shoplifter? Isn’t it fixed into Walmar’t business plan allowing for a percentage of mistakenly stolen items from the self-checkout?