Thursday Thirteen

1. I object to the fact that one of the grocery chains (Kroger) is doing away with the inserts in the newspaper. Yes, I still read a hard copy of the newspaper, but they're not even going to have the ads in the digital version.

2. The grocery chain is forcing shoppers to download their app in order to (a) see what's on sale and (b) receive more for their money using "digital coupons." I consider this extremely unfair and classist. It forces older people, who may not be as tech savvy, to pay more for items because they don't know how to use the app. It also forces people to interact with the app constantly in order to get the "digital" coupon.

3. This is time consuming. My solution has been to (mostly) stop shopping at this store. The first time I picked up something to purchase and missed the small print *with digital coupon* on a price and had to pay more for it, was the last time. I am shopping elsewhere now, as much as I can. Unfortunately, in a rural area, my options are slim, and this store sometimes is the only place I can purchase specific products.

4. My husband has a flip phone and not a smart phone, so he can't use the app and its stupid digital coupons, either. He's not the only person with a flip phone, I'm sure. The last time he was in the store, he called me so I could look up the digital coupons and put them on our card from my desktop.

5. My phone is a smart phone, but it is also at least 6 years old. It has trouble with QR codes. So, if I know I must go to Kroger, then I have to sit at my desktop, log into my account, and browse through the stupid digital coupons in order to get the price. (Actually, when it does pick up the QR code, you still have to flip through and "clip" the coupon to add to your account, they don't just automatically add themselves. Why is that? Why must I spend my time scrolling through this crap?)

6. If a store can afford to sell grapes at $1.99 a pound with a digital coupon, then why don't they just sell them for $1.99 in the first place, instead of robbing other people who aren't tech savvy and forcing them to pay $2.29 or whatever the "regular" price is.

7. I find coupons to be disingenuous. As I state in #6, if the product can be sold for the lower price, then sell it for that. This corporate greed has gotten way out of hand.

8. I also dislike self-check outs. Food Lion uses real people and produces jobs (so now I go there to shop more and more). Kroger has cut people yet doesn't pay me a dime to check out my own groceries. They've turned shoppers into workers and people simply accept that this is the way it is. Walmart has done the same thing. If you're going to force me to do all the work, then at least give me 10% off of my purchase or something. Robbers. Some corporations are just robbers.

9. It reminds me of how my mother complained when she had to start pumping her own gas. I am old enough to remember when she'd pull into the gas station and a fellow would come out, tip his hat to her, put gas in the car, and wash the windshield, with no extra cost for the $0.25 gallon of gas. Then somebody figured out people could pump their own gas, and that was the end of that.

10. People wonder where the jobs have gone. This is where a lot of jobs have gone - the companies figured out how to make you do something for free that they were paying staff to do.

11. This goes for other things like sending out paper statements and bills from the electric company or the credit card company. Somebody had to stuff the envelopes and take the payments. Who does that now if it's all online? Nobody even sees it, it goes through its little computer dance and poof! Maybe there are still people who reconcile accounts behind the scenes, but most of this is done with fewer people and more technology.

12. Which is to say, it's not the immigrants who are taking jobs. It's the people who have all the money who are finding ways to make even more who are stealing jobs. The less they need people, the less they have to pay out. Who needs a janitor when you can run an iBot over the floor?

13. I don't see this changing. If technology is going to continue to take jobs away, then somebody (and in this case I suspect it falls to the government) needs to find a way to create other types of work or we're going to end up with a world full of sick and unhappy people, with just a few at the top living molly-coddled lives while the rest suffer. People need jobs, they need purpose, they need to have basic needs filled. The times may be changing, but those basics haven't. 

Frankly, I'd rather pay the $2.29 for the grapes, not have to worry about a stupid coupon, and be checked out by a real person. 

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while, and this is my 809th time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.