Corporate Convenience

A number of thoroughly respectable people I know (ok, three, but those just happen to be the ones who mentioned it!) omit to pay for an item or two when they go through self-checkout.  They say that if the corp is going to steal their time and ease for the corp’s bottomline, they will reciprocate.

I haven’t done this myself, except on one occasion when the machine rang me up for two cheeses instead of one and I didn’t notice until I got out to the parking lot and it seemed like the only good solution short of waiting in line and trying to explain things to minimum wage sullen employees for an hour was just to take a cheese next time, which I did.  (I wonder how many times their machine has accidentally overcharged me?)  But I do hate the self-checkout and all the fuss and inconvenience and the only thing that keeps me from aping my acquaintances is frankly even the small chance of getting caught isn’t worth it for me.

Reader: aren’t you the fella who was just swanning about his cavalier dash and elan?

Me (staid burgher): You must be thinking of some other guy.

But what I would like to do is write a letter to each one of these corporations and inform them that I was from now on charging them a convenience fee of one time per use of the self-checkout, to be waived if there were a short enough line at the lone cashier that I could go that way if I wanted.  The letter would state that if for any reason they did not accept my policy they would be free to so indicate by registering at a website, the registration of which would require them to assent to a long list of boiler plate, provide scanned photo ID and a verification number from a person with the corporation who signs that they have the authority at a national level to determine corporate policy in these regards and/or to enter into contracts (because, after all, I might go into more than one store), and agree (this would be part of the boilerplate) that any disputes whatsoever would be submitted to arbitration.

Instead I usually just go to a grocery store that still has live checkout.

Edit:  Oh, and the website is a subscription service but the first month is free but you have to cancel in the last week using an automated telephone service whose number is not really listed anywhere on the site, and when you call its opaque menu hangs up on you randomly the first few times, and there is a number to call if you are having troubles with the automated service, but its just the same automated service number (thanks to Zen for this one).