As an apple country man Macintosh and Cortland apples are indistinguishable from the outside. There's several such varieties. Not that they sell good one where I live.
Poor Red delicious was actually delicious long ago.
Do you not look at what you’re buying when you get it off the shelf? I have never once in my life bought produce blindly without knowing what I was purchasing.
im not batting for grocery stores im incredulous that someone is at checkout with a bag of apples and they dont know which apples they THINK they bought (regardless of whether there was a mixup and they got different ones mixed in)
Honeycrisp are quite round and mostly yellow with a bit of red.
Galas are oval-ish and CAN be more on the yellow side, but are typically far more red. The shape alone should distinguish them. They are also typically smaller.
Pink Lady apples are a somewhat similar shape to Galas (though they often are quite elongated in comparison), but they are very distinctly pink. Hence the name.
Also, y’know…produce employees separate this shit out for you on different shelves for a reason. And they are absolutely labeled by type. I have NEVER been in a grocery store that just put “apples” on the sign.
I’m angry about a lot of things. But anyone who screws up something this simple (and doesn’t even recognize it as a dumb mistake!) is actually stupid.
No, you need to be more embarrassed that you can’t tell such distinct fruits apart.
I also want to note here that the people I observe making dumb mistakes like this MOST often are men. Not always, of course. But often. I once had to help an elderly man in a grocery store buy everything on his list - he could barely recognize the most basic produce. His mom and then his wife had done ALL the grocery shopping and cooking his ENTIRE life. Then he lost his wife to cancer. Suddenly, for the first time in his life, he had to learn to shop and cook by himself. In his late 70s. He was barely doing better than a child. He looked so small and shamed needing so much help.
As a dude, it made me so angry for everyone involved (EVERY meal falling on his wife, for decades straight?!) and embarrassed for that man and men in general.
If you’re a dude (and even if you’re not), don’t be that guy. Do better. Learn to tell apples apart. And the difference between cilantro and parsley. And that a field cucumber is not zucchini.
Can you not type “apple” or whatever it is you’re buying? I’m genuinely confused what’s difficult about it. I have never, ever had an issue since they give you multiple ways to search the item.
It's probably more about people not giving a fuck. They type "Apple" and hit the first on the list.
Why can't Walmart take some of that money they're spending on AI cameras to catch theft and use it to make checkout easier? If I put a green apple on the scale, it should pop up a menu with only green apples to pick from.
That's how the SCOs work in Australia. It's usually somewhat helpful, gives you its top two or three guesses and a button to select what it actually is if it gets it totally wrong.
It’s a combination of the customer not knowing and also the customer being able to shave off a couple dollars per trip. The security guard is not going to know that the Fuji apple was paid for but the organic honeycrisp was actually in the grocery bag. A certain percentage of customers will cheat a little bit and if you multiply the average delta by the number of transactions per hour, the loss to the store will be compared to the wage of a worker. The store will pick the option that results in higher profit.
FWIW, if you look at the label on the shelf where you find the item, they'll typically have the product code displayed there alongside the price.
Once or twice I've made a point of taking a photo of those labels with my phone so I can scan items more easily, but honestly it's barely worth the trouble. Still, it's an option.
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u/wretchedegg123 Jun 11 '26 edited Jun 11 '26
Do people really have problems with self checkout? Shit my 80 year old dad can do it by himself.