Zagorath @ Zagorath @aussie.zone

Formerly /u/Zagorath on the alien site.

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2 yr. ago

Why does Elon have Zuko's scar?

So is saying "Ukrainian should beat the Russian army" "removable", then?

Speaking of Russian propaganda, is saying "Russian soldiers invading Ukraine should be killed" also bannable?

anyone should be killing anyone else

Or, apparently, causing property damage 🤦‍♂️

But we're not talking about killing people. We're talking about killing an organisation. If someone had said "death to Apple", that is not the same as "death to Tim Cook and all his employees".

Wait, you can't even say a group should be eliminated? Not even people, but a group‽

Is "defund the police" also a bannable offence now?

So I take it then, that any comment even vaguely in support of Israel will be removed as against the TOS? Because surely advocating in favour of genocide, even indirectly, is far worse than criticising the organisation actually committing that genocide?

Don't get paid for donating in Aus.

Yeah I've never seen it myself. I'm not sure how widely it's been rolled out yet.

Running shirts tend to be made of nylon or polyester. Unfortunately I tend to hang on to my clothes a very long time so all the tags are worn away and I can't check, but I'm pretty sure all my running shirts are one of those.

Cotton is particularly bad because it chafes and it hangs on to sweat rather than wicking it away.

Of natural fibres, you probably want wool. I've particularly heard good things about merino wool. But avoid cotton for running.

Interesting. Thanks for the tip.

They've done an awful job of marketing it.

I think discovery is a pretty big inherent problem with the system. Unless you already know about it, to discover it requires that you use the app, and spot the "scan & go" option on the very busy home page

Compare that with handheld scanners that were becoming popular in the Netherlands 5 years ago, which create a visible wall you walk past every time you enter the store. Discovery is obviously much better in that method.

Which I think is why they're switching to these tablets in trolleys. People are going to trolleys anyway. I think it's a shame they're going with big cumbersome tablets rather than a simple handheld scanner that could be used with a basket or when just holding a few items, but oh well.

But you're completely right that they did a fucking terrible job marketing it. There were signs up all through the store, but if I didn't already know what it was I doubt I'd pay them any attention. A TV advertising campaign focused on "the shop of the future" it some such tagline could have gone a long way.

Oh that's a shame. Where was this, and when did they stop?

I quite like the idea of that option. Phone would be best, but I think the poor uptake scan & go had was probably because of the discovery problem. Most people don't use the Woolies app, and those who do use it probably don't notice the little "scan & go" option. But a wall of scanners right at the entrance is harder to miss. I'd have thought it should have much bigger uptake.

I think you may have misunderstood what Ilandar was saying, but I'm not exactly sure how, because I don't know which type of scan & go you're talking about.

Part of this stems from the fact that there are two types of scan & go. The older, superior (IMO, and theirs) option of scanning with your phone, tapping a few buttons to pay on your phone, and walk out. Then there's what they're replacing that with, which is dedicated tablets that sit in the trolley.

Ilandar was talking about how, if you're using a trolley anyway, there's basically no difference (except that, going forward, you'll have to pay at the gate, not on your phone—this is true even where Scan&Go mobile is sticking around). But if you're only grabbing a couple of items, you now have to get a big cumbersome trolley anyway, or choose to go the old-school method of self checkout.

I probably do a majority of my shops either by hand or with a basket. 1–15 items or so, depending on their size. But by hand or a basket can't do scan & go, anymore.

Oh goodie. On top of two years ago where they stopped letting you use 10% on an online delivery or direct to boot order. I was pissed at that, because they announced that change like a month after I had just renewed my Woolies Mobile annual subscription, a decision I made in part because of that precise perk.

Fuck that is an awesome design.

Shame it (a) appears to be cotton (not the material I want to be running in), and (b) is sold out.

I reckon at first it was probably making me do that about 1 in every 3 shops, which wasn't great. They definitely could have done a better job of making the onboarding experience nicer.

At a certain point I was getting frustrated with it and decided to start counting. After I started counting, I got checked 3 times out of 27 regular shops, and 0 times out of 11 "small" shops (which I defined as, very roughly, 5ish items or fewer, on account of the random checks asking staff to scan 5 items from your bag). Not sure how many times I had used it before I started keeping a tally, but I think around 20, and I think I was checked around 5 or 6 times.

If it had been up to me, I'd have made the first 3 or 4 shops almost guaranteed to not be checked for any new user, and then give them maybe a 1/5 chance for the next 30 or so shops, before easing off into what was apparently somewhere along the lines of a 1/10 chance or less. So you get an early good experience, but then get taught "hey, it is possible to get caught here" in a way that's a little gentler than what it actually was, but persistent enough to lock in that message.

The frequency with which I have problems with old-fashioned self-checkout certainly didn't hurt in converting me to this. Never once had it tell me I did something wrong like self-checkout does constantly. To me it just felt like "oh yeah, a routine random check". (And because it's a machine, I know it's actually random, unlike the "random" checks at airports.) The most irritating part was the fact that it was clearly used rarely enough that staff weren't on the lookout for people standing there awkwardly waiting to be scanned.

It’s a shame as it seems like an easy way to slip a few extra things in your shopping

Every so often (at first it seemed very frequent, then it dropped to much less frequently) it would pull you up for checking. It was pretty awkward, because you'd have to stand at the Scan&Go exit trying to get the attention of someone in the regular self-checkout or walking past in the store. Then once you got someone over, they'd pick 5 items from your bags at random and scan them, which would check that those items had been paid for. They were clearly trained not to just pick the items from the top, too, as sometimes they go reaching down to the bottom of the bag or go for other bags that weren't as obviously presented.

It's arguably actually harder to reliably get away with stealing than conventional self-checkout. Because in the latter nobody's ever going to check unless you cause an error to occur.

Full list of stores closing this feature and those that are keeping it but without the mobile payment here.

Anyone know of other stores, big or small, that have something like this? It's literally been the reason I was a relatively loyal Woolies customer the last two or three years. I've always avoided Aldi because they don't even have basic self-checkout. But nor do I really want to keep going to Woolies and Coles who apparently are actively undoing their advances, even if the point they're going back to is a bit ahead of where Aldi is still at...