Self Checkout Lane

Are these stores really saving money by PISSING OFF ALL THE CUSTOMERS?

as usual, I found some image online to support my blog entry (above) and I think it’s ironic that this was a picture from home depot… in my opinion the WORST OF THE WORST when it comes to self checkout.

I mean why have 10 registers? Just to impress me during the grand opening and maybe around Xmas time? The rest of the year I have to find some way to ring myself up for a bag of nails… rebar… and pieces of lumbar too big to fit in the staging area?

This morning it was the save-mart or what-not… up the road here… All I wanted was 2 bags of ice. Do you know how long 2 bags of ice takes to buy when there is nobody in line? Should be fucking effortless… but no… the whole process took me 5 minutes before the machine was ready to take my monies… the All-Seeing-Attendant tried to ring me up but pushed a few wrong buttons and then had to scan some badge of his at my self-checkout-terminal twice just to get the thing to unlock.

After all is said and done and precious minutes of my life have been wasted, the attendant says “Have nice day… don’t forget your ice.”

Someday… mark my words… the Self Checkout Lane will be looked back upon as one of the signs of the impending end of civilized life on this planet…

Message in a Bottle

Americans spent more money last year on bottled water than on ipods or movie tickets: $15 Billion. A journey into the economics–and psychology–of an unlikely business boom. And what it says about our culture of indulgence.

www.fastcompany.com/magazine…ttle.html

The Future of the Internet?

There’s been a lot of these 3-D chat ads lately… especially here on tribe…

When I first got into 3D graphics i went to this conference where Adobe had a booth set up and they were demoing Adobe Atmosphere… kind of a 3-D environment thing for websites… and I thought to myself… “wow this is going to be the future… someday there will be some new 3D code to replace html and xml and flash and all that stuff… and a person’s personal website will be a 3D environment that you can walk through… You can tell people ‘hey come check out this video over at my place… my WEBplace’…” At the time I was thinking there might be big money in learning 3D modelling so that when this new world emerges I could rake in the cash by making custom high-quality avatars for rich nerds….

Now it looks like that might actually be a possible reality here very soon… i rarely click on these ads on tribe, but this one caught my attention… Looks like a combination of myspace and an MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game)

I hope this doesn’t come off like I’m helping them advertise… but the whole concept fascinates me to death… I have many many theories about 2012 and the evolving internet is central to nearly all of them…

Video games were the beginning of virtual reality… especially the the new school ones where you can explore… not just be confined to a storyline.

Are we on our way? If so, is our virutal world going to be a mirror image of the world we have now? Is the world we have now a mirror image of a previous world that we destoryed? And where the fuck is Neo when I need him?