Shane Curcuru loves the signs at Shaws/Star Markets.

Call them Shaw's or Star Market or Shirley, but just make a decision and stick with it already.

The poem by Marie Howe (who used to live around here) starts:

The people Jesus loved were shopping at the Star Market yesterday.
An old lead-colored man standing next to me at the checkout
breathed so heavily I had to step back a few steps.

Spatch pens an ode to joy, the hyper-exclamation-pointed freezer section at his local Shaw's.

Earlier:
Buy it! Cook it! Eat it!

Marc Stober, a programmer, concludes that the problem with those stupid card readers at Shaw's and Star Market is not stupid programming but bad hardware:

... Theoretically you can touch "Yes" on the touchscreen - I've actually gotten this to work before they started with the tape and notes–but the touchscreens are so flighty that it hardly ever reads your response (or reads it as "No"), so the only reliable way to complete the transaction is to use the Enter button. ...

He also discusses problems with Stop & Shop's card readers.

Earlier:
The world's most annoying credit-card devices.

For the past few months, Shaw's and Star Market have been taping up their credit/debit card readers with these stupid notes that tell you to hit "Enter" instead of "Yes" when the readers tell you to hit "Yes." I know I invariably hit "Yes," because that's what the stupid thing tells me to do. Dudes, bite the bullet and hire some programmers to rewrite the damn interface already, will ya?

Krissy in Boston writes one of these jerkwad devices helped add to her already sucky day:

... I went to the Auburndale Shaw's to get some tissues, throat lozenges, etc ... and the stupid teenage cashier started yelling at me because when it says: "$XX.XX is your total. Is that correct?" I pressed YES, but apparently you're supposed to press ENTER. (Apparently I forgot about that after a similar debacle at the same supermarket last October.) I swear, when interviewing at Shaw's they must ask: "Are you surly, unfriendly, and kind of nasty?" And if you answer yes, they give you the job. ...

When last we left Paul, he was discussing his flashmobbery with a cop outside the Mt. Auburn Street Star Market - said cop having been one of three alerted by Shaws that Paul and his nefarious flashmobbers were on the way. Paul gets home to discover 1,198 hits to his site from psn1a.shaws.com.

Say what you will about Star Market. At least they know what the Internets are for. Seems the Mt. Auburn Star was prepared for Paul and his TV-screen flashmobbers yesterday: Not only were three cops waiting for them, but the store made sure all the registers were manned to keep his band of merry pranksters from gumming up the works - because they'd heard all about it via a copy of the e-mail Paul'd sent out:

... They put on extra cashiers to deal with a possible agitprop Armageddon! That's money out of their pocket, folks! We also helped shoppers by shortening their lines - in effect, we gave them customer service they never could have dreamed of on a Saturday.

At the checkout, with my greeting card rattling around in my otherwise empty hand basket, I stared at the checkout TV. A woman with a full cart came up in back of me. "G'head," I told her.

"But, you've only got one item," she reminded me.

"S'ok." I pointed to the TV. "This is really good." Reluctantly, she moved ahead of me. ...

Earlier:
Flashmob at the Star Market!

Paul's putting together a flash mob for a local Star/Shaws this Saturday at noon. Yes, of course he has a reason - to convince the chain to keep all those wonderful TVs that seem to go mostly unwatched:

I fear that if customers don't start paying attention to these screens, they'll take them out of the stores. I don't know about you, but I cannot bear to think about a world where you can't watch TV in the supermarket. ...

Depending on how many show up, you'll either congregate around the biggest TV in the store or break into groups at each TV:

Then...we watch TV, discuss the programs, take notes, pull staffers aside to ask what aisle these products are in, get annoyed because other customers are jostling us or talking too loudly to hear it. Or anything else you can come up with. If the crowd is huge, I'd love to place people in the checkout lanes who will keep letting people get in front of them because they just can't take their eyes off the screen.

The mega-humongo-hyper-huge Star Market on Rte. 1 in Dedham has a freezer section that seems to stretch for about a mile. And a good thing that is, given that whoever designed it apparently had a warehouse full of exclamation points they had to do something with.