Schinckel.net

The new Mitcham Square shopping centre has (kind-of) opened. It’s all very new and clean, and has quite a few shops. The cinema hasn’t opened yet, but it will be nice when it does. No more treks down to Marion to go to the movies. I hate that place. I went into Mitcham Square today to go to the supermarket. The carpark isn’t quite complete, meaning finding a park, and driving around at all was kind of difficult. At least I did find one fairly close to the entrance. Once I went up the escalator ramp, I was in the new place. As soon as I stepped out onto the shiny tiles, I nearly slid on may arse. That floor is very slippery. Old people beware. I wandered around and found the Foodland. Classy new supermarket building; RFID (I assume) price tags on the shelves. That is, no printed labels with prices, but all little LCD screens. Now, I’m all for modern technology that improves our lives, but I have some issues with this particular instance. Firstly, the tags are smaller than regular price labels, and because there is no backlight, you actually need to move in quite close to see the price. And I have good eyesight! Half of the tags had scrolling text ($1.99; Normally $3.99, Save $2.00!), although admittedly the current price was always visible. But small. Secondly, here in (South?) Australia, we have a special Code of Conduct for Electronic Registers. That is, if you purchase an item, and the register records the price as higher than the one written on the shelf, you get the item free. (If you purchased more than one, only the first is free, the remainder are at the lower price!). This is all well and good, but what’s to stop the electronic shelf tag being networked in, and price updated automatically? I’d personally suspect they aren’t (lots of tags -> lots of IP addresses, even inside a private IP range). So, I’d suspect there are programmers that need to be held near the tag to update the price. Okay then, I want one of those. I’d go around changing the prices, and bingo! Everything for free. • My final whinge is against another shop there. I walked up the escalator (yes, they aren’t there to just stand still on!), and thought “Oh cool. An Illy.” However, that sign was misleading. Apparently it isn’t a proper Illy cafe, just sells Illy brand coffee. Except that the Illy sign is more visible (especially when coming up the way I did) than the name of the cafe.