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Slashdot is advertising CVS loyalty cards now?

Yeah, doesn't really meet the standard of News for Nerds or Stuff that matters. I prefer the way Meijer handles their loyalty program & receipts. I just punch in my phone number at checkout, and my electronic coupons & everything is applied automatically, and I get my receipt emailed to me as a PDF. If I need to do a return, I just whip out my phone & pull up the PDF. Much more efficient.

WebVan is the most famous. As I see it, home grocery delivery is an infrastructure problem. WebVan failed by expanding rapidly in multiple markets, before they had the cash flow to really support even one market. Furthermore, the infrastructure they built was not really what they needed (which is why they should have started in one market and expanded.......make the mistakes at a small scale, then you know what to avoid when you scale up).

Now there are plenty of companies doing it. I know one person who does all their shopping this way. I had the impression Google was already doing this is in some markets.

A typical electric space heater comes in 3 ratings.

500W
1000W
1500W

That said, I found a cute little 200W one that barely feels warm even after running for hours at walmart that is intended for use on cubicle farm desks.

It really *IS* 200W at peak. I have run it successfully for hours on a 400W DC plug power inverter meant for a laptop during a winter camping trip. My impression is that the ceramic heating core heats efficiently, but that it has a rather guttless fan.

If they used something like that on the remote controlled outlet, I doubt it would cause a fire.

Name me one chain that has these machines well made?

I've been reasonably pleased with the ones at Meijer. The only thing that seems to really trip people up routinely is the fact that the place where you put the groceries is also a scale, and you need to not put stuff in your cart or let your kid lean up against that area. Most of the problems I see seem to be genuine customer stupidity, and you get that in normal checkout lines too. They've even done some light enforcement of the item limit; they claim that some people were damaging the scales by putting too much weight on it, and while I don't know if that's true, it's believable.

Most people use them for groceries, which have much better weight characteristics than the Home Depot loads people have been complaining about. (A more even distribution of weight, instead of something massive followed by a single, solitary washer.)

The second generation is actually a little fruitier, but I'm still hoping it'll be OK.

Oh, Meijer has a cashier for each set of 4 auto-checkouts. This can't hurt any. And their training seems to actually be pretty good, to my surprise; they seem to know what they are doing.

I'm not convinced you can have a fully automated checkout line; you need some humans to deal with things like no barcodes, and to explain to people how to handle exceptional cases like produce.

The concept involved is fair-trade, the idea is if all of the retail outlets begin sales at the same date, then they all have a fair shot at the market. By agreeing to the "street date" then the stores will get their shipments in time for the street-date without worrying about shipments delayed by third-party shippers. Outlets that violate the street-dates have to worry about their early shippment agreement getting voided, and the their shippments will be timed to arrive just-in-time rather than in-plenty-of-time. Now I doubt that they will do this with Meijers because they are a huge outlet, in their market area, Walmart competes with Meijers, not the other way arround. Most likely what happened is some minimum-wage sales clerk either put them out to soon cluelessly, or thought it was a good idea to jump the street-date.

Meijer stores, a self-described grocery and general merchandise retailer

For those who have never had the pleasure to go to a Meijer, it's like a large, clean Wal-Mart Supercenter. The smallest Meijer store that I've been in is still larger than my hometown. I believe that Wal-Mart's supercenters are possibly patterned after the large Meijer stores.

Check out their web site.

To be completely honest, they've been doing a good job of tracking us anyway over the past decade. Of course, this is a bad thing, so it's nice to know that we won't have an electronic bulls' eye stuck on our package of Sam's Peanut Butter Cups for the time being.

Still, keep in mind that everything we buy with that special discount card from your local grocery store is linked to your name, address, telephone number, date of birth, annual salary, previous purchases, purchase trends, purchase times, and favorite cashiers. I would mind heavily if they didn't pay me for mine - of course, that's because I work at Meijer for mine, and I now have an associates' degree, so the tracking can be more easily rectified by finding a new job and leaving the 10% discount behind.

I would recommend finding tinfoil bags for your groceries soon, however.

1. Buy them fresh. Many smaller florists only get them in once a week, you may want to call in advance (today) to find out what day they get delivered. Of course, if you are waiting until the 14th to give them away, they are better off stored at the florists.
2. Plan ahead. Valentines is peak season for florists - your best bet is to order a bouquet today for pickup on the 13th or 14th.
3. Get Floritech or a similar preservative to get the longest life from the roses - they should last a week at least. For bonus points, get the florist to place a water-filled vial on each stem (called waterpicks, IIRC), to give you a little more flexibility in transporting the roses home / to your significant other's (SO) place. Rose care instructions.
4. Buy a really nice vase which matches your SO's decor, and bring help your SO place the roses into it. Alternatively, you can get a florist to place a bouquet into a vase of your choice, as long as you can transport a vase full of water.
5. Buy one, three, six, or multiples of a dozen roses - two or four roses look too symmetrical in a vase. Also, ask for some greens (fern-like green stuff that helps to fill in the bare rose stems) and baby's breath. Of course, colour matters
6. Look into rose preservation - you can dry roses easily at home, and make a decent arrangement. Do a google search, but even hanging them upside down beside a window should work.

I think privacy went out the window a long time ago with marketing, but we have to consider that our privacy has two parts: our unique life, and our generalized interaction with this world. If you look at my mail, I bet you could guess that I work on computers. That's fine as far as I'm concerned, and I think privacy on a large scale is still very much in tact. Microsoft doesn't care that I went to Meijer this morning for coffee, and that it was exactly 3.5 miles from my house, and that I walked about 20 steps to get into my place. That's my privacy!!! Not the fact that I work in computers. Yes I would like less junk mail... no I do not want my government records available for download, but as far as everything else, I accept that this is what drives the money around.

I'm not sure about WalMart, but there is a interesting story about Meijer:
(WalMart + IGA (in midwest) = Meijer)
Someone bought a 22 cal. in Meijer and went out into the parking lot an committed suicide. The family members sued Meijer for selling a firearm to someone so 'distressed'. I'm not sure how the case ended, but as a result of this case, Meijer now only carries Blackpowder guns and Air (pellet & BB) guns. This is very unfortunate!

Perhaps the MP3 community (I was Napster banned for 1 remix of a Metallica song) should look to the firearms industry for knowledge. The firearms industry has been fighting stupid lawsuits for years.

Like MP3 companies, the firearms companies are being sued so that they accept the responsiblity of individuals who do stupid things with their products. I don't think trading MP3's is stupid, but I agree that an individual should be held responsible when using a product in an illegal manner.

If one conclusion can be made by looking at the firearm industry is that the MP3 companies are going to endure years of litigation until the recording industry can find someone else to blame or another way to make money.

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