Self-print produce stickers at Stop & Shop

The supermarket has this new self-checkout system, where you walk around with a little bar code scanner and tally up your purchases as you go, then drop it off, pay, and off you go. (If you've seen the gift registry setups at some store, it's roughly the same idea.)

This is all well & good, but it doesn't work for things with no bar code, like fruits & vegetables. No problem, set a scale where you can print out price tags on demand, right?

Err, well, sort of. Except that it prints a tag every time someone does a price check, which turns out to be often. So there's a lot of extra tags. And no where to put them. Except the scale itself.

No problem, we can fix this in software, right? Apparently not -- they've rigged a clipboard with a piece of scrap cardboard to affix the extra stickers to. Well, the ones not already on the scale, the pedestal, the floor, or some other nearby object.

A couple of weeks later, this approach was improved by covering everything in shrink-wrap. Still stickers everywhere, but at least slightly easier to clean up.