What did you do in the garden today?

[Smokerbill]

I need some dishes/recipes for cherry tomatoes! I have and will have lots. Gobs. A veritable plethora. They seem too sweet to use for sauce; so far they're just for snacking and salads.

Add peeled cherry tomatoes to a jar with fresh herbs. Cover with vodka and refrigerate. Then get yourself marinated after marinating the tomatoes for a few days...

 

[NanaK]

I always try to buy extra as well. I just don't like to shop so when I do I get a few of a lot of stuff. Sometimes I get funny looks from people. Really don't care!

I'm so old that I remember a time when a store clerk would ring up your purchases, bag them for you, and even walk you out to your car and load the bags of groceries.

The small store I shop still does this. It's a lost art called customer service! Rarely see it now days.

My first job was after school at a grocery store.

Me too. We had to actually figure out the change and count it back to people. A lot of cashiers would have problems with that today. Also when we had a power outage they gave us a hand crank. We could still check out any customers still in the store. Today everything has to shut down.

 

[Sally PB]

Add peeled cherry tomatoes to a jar with fresh herbs. Cover with vodka and refrigerate. Then get yourself marinated after marinating the tomatoes for a few days...

Alas, the only use I have for vodka is to make my own vanilla.

 

[TJAnonymous]

Today I was putting my bags in the cart to leave, and saw the box of dishwasher soap I'd put on the the bottom shelf of the cart. I hadn't put it on the conveyor, so the cashier hadn't seen it. I had paid with a check, and she'd cashed me out. I paid for it with cash, so as not to hold up the line behind me. They often don't have enough lanes open on Sunday, which is a busy shopping day.

I probably could have walked out with it. But that's not how I roll.

That's called integrity. Sadly it seems to be a rare animal these days.

 

[gtaus]

I couldn't count the times I had to correct a cashier when a price rang up wrong. I remember most of the prices as I pick things up, and watch the readout when they're checked.

I've missed things too, and immediately went to the customer service desk to get the 15 cents I was overcharged. LOL

Yep, that's me, too. I once called over a self-checkout "manager" at WalMart because something that I bought rang up for $1.25 instead of $1.00 on the shelf. The young lady looked at me with like "you're complaining to me about 25 cents!" So, I asked her, does WalMart add a 25% markup on all their items at the checkout, or just what I buy?

I think my comment went right over the young woman's head. Anyways, I made her call a manager over to the checkout station to do a manual override while I held up everyone in line behind me. To make it even better, the manager said it would take time to verify the price on the shelf. To which I replied, "that's OK, I can wait and I'm sure everyone behind me waiting in line won't be bothered at all while you verify you overcharged me."

One day I was at Home Depot's customer service desk trying to buy an item. I'm a veteran, and Home Depot gives us a 10% discount on most, but not all, products. We veterans used to just show the clerk our Veteran's ID and they would punch in the code for the military discount. Well, Home Depot decided that they had to move everything to smart phone apps - not my strong point, I admit. But you use the smartphone with their app and it gives you a QR code on the smartphone to scan. Well, the internet in the store was so slow that my military discount QR code was not loading. I showed the lady my Veteran's ID and asked if she could just manually enter it for my purchase. She said she could not. OK, fine, the game was on. I kept on entering the info for my QR code for over 10 minutes as the line behind me started to grow and grow. I refused to step aside and let anyone else take my place. After 15 minutes of no success with the store's slow internet connection and no QR code coming up on my app, the customer service lady finally entered in the override code herself because the line was about 6 people long and it was looking bad for her. So, I got my military discount on the purchase and went out to my car. However, I decided that situation was completely uncalled for. I went back into the store, talked to a manager about my interaction at the customer service desk and the difficulty getting a QR code for my discount, and said that they could have entered the override code at the start if they had wanted to do it, because they certainly could do it after 15 minutes and lining people up backed up into the plumbing department. The manager agreed. I was in Home Depot last week, and my military QR code was not scanning, and a young man came over, scanned a code he had attached to his vest, and immediately I got my military discount and was out the door. I like to think my conversation with the manger had something to do with the improvements.

To make this somewhat related to gardening, I buy lots of my tools and gardening supplies from Home Depot - always taking advantage of my military discount!

 

[gtaus]

I need some dishes/recipes for cherry tomatoes! I have and will have lots. Gobs. A veritable plethora. They seem too sweet to use for sauce; so far they're just for snacking and salads.

Dear Wife made some spaghetti sauce out of fresh cherry tomatoes and that was good. She plans on using some of the frozen cherry tomatoes this winter for lasagna and other pasta dishes. I'm thinking they might also be good for pizza toppings. I don't think the frozen cherry tomatoes would be any good for snacking or salads as they don't hold their form after thawing out - from what I am told. But they are great fresh tomatoes after thawing out for baking and sauces.

My favorite tomato is the Roma, but I'll only have enough of those for direct fresh use on the table. There won't be any left for freezing. I love cherry tomatoes in salads, but they are also good cooked in dishes and sauces. Plus, I have lots of cherry tomatoes this year. Next year I plan on starting more varieties of tomatoes. That should be good.

 

[gtaus]

Today I was putting my bags in the cart to leave, and saw the box of dishwasher soap I'd put on the the bottom shelf of the cart. I hadn't put it on the conveyor, so the cashier hadn't seen it. I had paid with a check, and she'd cashed me out. I paid for it with cash, so as not to hold up the line behind me. They often don't have enough lanes open on Sunday, which is a busy shopping day.

I probably could have walked out with it. But that's not how I roll.

Honesty can be its own reward. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who know how to scam the system.

For example, Dear Wife was checking out food goods at WalMart's self-checkout, and when she finished, she noticed that the total was almost $50 more than what she had in the bag! Even she noticed that. So, she called over a "manager" and asked why the total was so high? Turns out someone before her had swiped a number of beauty products, bagged them up, and left without paying. So, when my wife got to the self-checkout, it thought the transaction was still in progress, and everything was added to her bill! Well, she got the refund for those beauty products, but it was a hassle as they had to empty all the bags to verify she had not purchased those items.

My brother knows a lady that got caught swiping a cheap products at the scanner but then tossing expensive items in the bag. I wonder how many people do that and never get caught? We all pay for theft in increased costs that get passed on to us.

Frankly, my concern is that something happens at the self-checkout that I am unaware of, and that I might be stopped as I leave the store and accused of wrongdoing. At least when they had checkout clerks at the counter, you could not be accused of not swiping the product(s). That would have been their mistake.

 

[WthrLady]

They move it on purpose just so people have to spend time hunting for things, and hopefully make some impulse purchases. Grocery stores (big chain ones, anyway) are sneaky. I think there are lots of studies on product placement and atmosphere tricks to make people buy more stuff.

They don't make it on me. I go with a list, I'm in, I'm out.

 

[ShrekDawg]

They don't make it on me. I go with a list, I'm in, I'm out.

Not me even with a list I still don’t stick to it. And I don’t usually make one.

 

[chickengr]

I've always tried to keep enough on hand to last me 6 months if SHTFan. Beans/rice/canned good/toiletries. My planning paid off when the Covid lockdown hit, and I had a year's supply of toilet paper on hand. LOL

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