The health food supermarkets here have bulk food bins where you can fill up bags with things like rice, flour, dried fruit, nuts, etc. You’re supposed to write the PLU code on the bag for the cashier… so, I forced myself to stop writing them down.
Does anyone memorize things at the supermarket, or practice mental calculation? I was thinking that I’m going to start memorizing all the prices in my shopping cart and keep a running total and inventory.
Memorizing PLU codes is also a useful exercise for people who work as cashiers.
Now that’s pressure, maybe having to tell the Whole Foods clerk you forgot the PLU. Good practice.
I hadn’t really considered memorizing the prices (although Ron White did a video on that) but I always add up the items in my head rounding up to fifty cents so that I know w maximum of what I should owe. Then I know whether to check the tape if it’s too far off.
And a familiar market is a good journey especially the California ones with all their add-ons like coffee bars and flower shops.
I like to go to 99 cent stores where the clerks and many of the products are Mexican and learn the name for each product in Spanish.
The worst case scenario is having to say, “sorry, I forgot to write the numbers”. I failed the first few times, which made it a good exercise. That was the first recall pressure I had to deal with. Now I don’t feel the pressure anymore.
Whole Foods has a booklet of all the codes. I wonder if a cashier would be able to create a mnemonic system partially based off the PLU codes they know.
When I worked as a cashier several years ago and someone paid with cash I would calculate their change in my head before I punched it into the register.
Produce Look Up (PLU) codes are standardized and could make an interesting list of items to be memorized. Alternately one might use these codes as a pre-memorized means of associating pictures of particular items with numbers in general (perhaps to fill in a large system). Supermaket Page.com provides a useful list of codes in numeric order, most of them with associated photos if someone were inclined to utilize it: http://supermarketpage.com/prucodes.php
Thanks for the list. I wish I had known about mnemonic techniques when I was a cashier. I could have used regular customers and produce in my mnemonic system.
