Yes, the alcoholic from their 20s to 80s (approx 1/2 a plastic bottle of vodka a day) was one of the least stressed people in the family. They were also the healthiest in their 90s compared to the smokers.
To put a concrete number on "tons" - when I was a kid we'd frequently check out 300 books at a time, and the reason the number was 300 was that library cards had a limit of 100 each, and my mom, my dad, and I each had our own library card. Any time I was home sick from school they were all used to check out books for me; and yes, we would go through all 300 of them. Kids' books are pretty short.
I don't understand why you need to wait to the end to checkout. It should happen via mobile app while you add things to the cart. At the end scan a qr code to pay or something when you leave.
Walmart serves all kinds of income levels of people, some of whom do not have a mobile phone (the poor, the homeless) and others who would have trouble using one (elderly). Requiring an app to track things going into and out of your cart is just not workable there.
Ultimately, it's cheaper to hire minimum wage workers to just deal with stuff. There's always going to be people so desperate for a job that they'll work there and get public assistance to cover what their paycheck doesn't.
What's how it works at Walmart if you have a Walmart+ subscription.
I scan things with my phone as I put them into my cart. As I approach the self-checkout area I press "checkout" in the app, and it tells me how many items it thinks I have and I tell it that is right.
At the self-checkout terminals on the home screen there is a QR code. I scan that from the Walmart app, tell it how many store-provided bags I'm using, and click the "pay" button. A second or two later it thanks me on the screen, the green "this terminal is available light" above the terminal comes on, and a receipt appears on my phone.
I push my cart out to my car, holding up the phone so the person at the Walmart exit can see the receipt. At my car I unload the cart into my bags.
If it is cold or rainy out so I don't want to be standing behind my car unloading my shopping cart I'll bring my bags into the store and load them as I shop.
The only real annoyance was weighed produce, but they recently fixed that. The way it had worked was when scanning the item in the app it would tell you it needed to be weighed and that would done at checkout. At checkout it would go through the items that needed weighing and ask you to put them on the scale. Then it would update your cart with the calculated prices for those items and you could continue checkout.
The problems were that (1) if you put an item on the scale too early it could get confused, and (2) the communications between the scale, terminal, back end, and phone was sometimes flakey. The result was that sometimes checkout would hang at the weighing and an associate would have to come and reset things or transfer your cart to a human operated register and complete checkout there.
It was annoying enough that I'd sometimes not scan the items that would need weighing from the app, and then when I got to the self-checkout terminal I'd first scan (with the terminal's scanner, not the app) and weigh the items that need them, pay with my physical credit card, and then do another checkout for the app scanned items.
A month or so ago they put in new digital scales in the produce section. Now if I add an item that will need weighing from the app it tells me it will need weighing and tells me I can do it at one of the scales or at checkout. The scales in the produce section give the weight in both human friendly form and as a QR code. From the app I pick an item that needs weighing and point the phone at that QR code, and the app updates the item with the weight and price.
Different organisms have different metabolic pathways. Humans are unable to synthesize 9 of the 21 most common amino acids, and must acquire them from food. To learn more, look up "Essential Amino Acid".
Cows do it by having a complicated multiple-chambered stomach full of specialized bacteria that can digest cellulose -- basically a natural chemical engineering facility.
Wow, this line is a keeper. This whole comment is so insightful. Reminds me of how awesome HN can be sometimes.
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