One at a time

[IHateStupidCustomers]

Hhm....when I worked at sears, we had PC based registers, and when you scanned something it would come up with the item #, name, price, and quantity. We could just change the number in the quantity field, if we needed to. I don't ever remember not being allowed to....but, I was in shoes, and we rarely needed to use it....

[PhiSigGirl1988]

They just recently took away our quantity key at Meijer. My disappointment was immense when I figured out which key was missing on our registers.

[Tee]

We have quantity keys where I work, but are unable to use it unless it's 24+ of an item, and then we have to get a manager to activate it for that single item. Sometimes it takes so long for them to get there, that I could have scanned it all by hand, but we are forbidden from doing that. Apparently, saving receipt paper is more important than getting the customers through fast.

We also had a 3rd party Inventory company come through recently. We were only supposed to check 1/3 of what they did (Thankfully by hand), but we (And I mean mostly me, who is kinda weird when it comes to being exact) found so many errors, we had to do them all, during our peak hours too.

[Kogarashi]

I have to point out that the policy has changed. I work at wal-mart and the rule is that you can use the quantity key if it's 6+ items, and anything under you can just scane once, and press enter to repeat. And we don't use flashing lights anymore, we're tricky here, we send little messages to a hand held PDA that the CSMs have.

And as for the barcode, we can type in a barcode if we have it, but if there is no barcode, we have to call someone over to get another product with a barcode, which can take some time. But I think that's pretty common.

Huh. They never told us that about the quantity key when I worked at the store last year (my more recent Wal-Mart employment). I was under the impression that we still had to use the enter key or scan them individually. I only really found it annoying for items I then had to wrap in bags (breakables) or similar unwieldy items. Cheapo school folders and Kool-Aid packets were actually fun to scan individually, especially if the customer had them in a neat stack.

I was told the problem had something to do with confusing Inventory if you used the quantity key.

With the non-scanning item, not only could we enter a barcode if we had one, if we were just given the correct price we could also enter it under a department number and brief description.