Empty Grove

On Saturday night, Garrett and I drove out to Spruce Grove to attend Heather's highschool play. Spruce Grove is basically a suburb of Edmonton, although it's actually a little farther away than I expected. This was my first trip to Spruce Grove, although it didn't really impress as much as I had expected it would. It's actually quite small, although it contains a myriad of big box stores including Walmart, Rona, Home Depot and Superstore. We headed out to Spruce Grove early to visit our friend's store: Randy owns a health food store, and we stopped in to celebrate its three year anniversary with him. Afterwards, we dropped in quickly at Walmart and Home Depot. I feel I need to point out that the only reason we went to Walmart was because a lady in my lab gave me a bottle of paint stripper to use, and I had to replace it. The only place I could get that brand was Walmart. I haven't been in a Walmart for ages before today because I really don't like Walmart. However, this isn't the point of my blog entry.

We learned that in Spruce Grove, although they have enough people to shop in the big box stores, they don't have enough people to WORK in the big box stores.

In Walmart, we entered the "Self-Checkout" line up because it was much shorter than the other lines. We wandered up to the machine and proceeded to ring in our own purchases. Fine, we had one item only, no big deal. The self-checkout machine, though, was SUPER annoying! This LOUD female voice yells to you and tells you what to do, but the insructions are so slow that anyone who has a clue is too fast for it. So you end up waiting while the voice finishes telling you to do that which you have just done.

Next, we grabbed ourselves dinner at Quizno's, then a Starbuck's frappucino before we stopped in quickly at Home Depot. Again, we only purchased a few items, however once we got to the front of the store, we noticed THERE ARE NO CASHIERS. They ONLY have self-checkout machines. What the...? So, again, we checked ourselves out with the annoying female voice yelling at us. She really didn't like it when I set my frappucino down on the counter near the bag with our purchased items. Apparently they weigh your bag as you fill it to make sure that you pay for everything that goes in the bag. Anyway, the whole procedure is bizarre and I now understand my Dad's annoyance regarding self-checkouts, since he recently encountered them at a Home Depot in Vancouver. Seriously, can they not just hire someone to check out my items for me? Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I'm not so keen on the self-checkouts. It seems that the least they can do is pay someone minimum wage to serve me while I give them my money. But hey, maybe we just really don't have any workers in Alberta...