Morton Fox's journal

Went out this afternoon for the Signal's Hangout geocache. It's at a strip mall in Bear. It's also rather convenient because the bank is just across the road and I had to do some banking anyway.

After that, we went to Super Fresh to pick up some broccoli and milk. Noticed that the clearance rack had lots of items we could use so that's where most of the shopping actually took place. Funny how I can go to the store for two items and come home with four bags full! Anyway, the way clearance specials work at Super Fresh is they set aside all the items with damaged packaging and stick "50% off" coupons on those. A 50% discount doesn't always make brand name items a good deal but some store brand items do end up on the clearance rack too and those could be good buys. Today's most noteworthy deal was the pasta. On clearance, it was a mere 25 cents per box. Take that, dollar store!

It's a lousy system though. At checkout time, the cashier has to scan the item, peel off the 50%-off coupon and scan it, and then manually key in the discount amount. This is a slow process and tends to hold up the checkout line when there are more than a few clearance items to scan. It's also an error-prone process. The cashier made some mistakes keying in the amounts and had to call a supervisor to correct those. It would be better if the supermarket printed out new barcodes that scan to the discounted prices and stuck those over the existing barcodes. That would streamline the checkout process by making scanning a clearance item no different from scanning any other item. That's how they handle clearance stuff at Target, for example.