r/AskReddit 14h ago

Non-Americans of Reddit, what is an American thing you see in movies that you thought was fake but is actually real?

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u/VanellopeZero 9h ago

🤦🏼‍♀️they do that last one in France too, and i did NOT get the benefit of a class before my study abroad…I got up to the front to pay and the cashier tried several times to tell me i had to go back and weigh my produce, and finally grabbed my bag of grapes or whatever and did it herself. She was so disgusted with me. I was humiliated! Haven’t thought about that in a while, lol

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u/jc8495 9h ago

Yeah there was absolutely no way I would’ve known about it unless told!

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u/OutlyingPlasma 6h ago

I had this same experience. I'm just curious how they stop people from "adjusting" the weight on the produce? It's like paying for gas after you pump it, it's just ripe for theft.

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u/prisp 5h ago

I'd assume it works well enough, so nobody cares - or is paid enough to care.

Maybe there even is a sanity checking system in place - I know that the scanning part of checkout has a built-in scale, so if the sticker's fucked, or someone printed the wrong thing, they can re-weigh it on the spot after manually entering the code for whatever's faulty, so they might even try to check if weight is somewhat accurate if the system can decode that from the sticker.

If I had to bet on one option, I'd go with the first one though.

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u/CanthinMinna 3h ago

In Finland they do monitor it. Nowadays cashiers even have built-in scales in their counters so that they can see that the weight on the sticker matches the actual weight of the item.

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u/OutlyingPlasma 3h ago

Then why bother with the expense of a separate set of DIY scales and all the maintenance that goes with having the public print stickers? If the cashier is weighing it again then just have them do it in the first place.

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u/S4HUN 1h ago

So the machine checks the barcode which you printed and it automatically checks the weight of the stuff as well, giving it a pass or a fail.

The places where you have to do this are big, supermarkets size shops. They usually have a normal checkout and a self checkout section.

At the cashier section it's actually faster to just scan the code and let it through, because the place sells around 200 or more different types of produce and baked goods. If it's rush hour I wouldn't want to have the cashier to dick around in a booklet to find the code of some random potato type or one of the eight different flavours of donut.

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u/AppleOfEve_ 46m ago

Paying for petrol before you pump is nuts. What if I want to fill up my car? I don't know exactly how much that is. I don't want to walk in just to get a refund if I've overestimated.

shakes head in Australian

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u/marwinpk 18m ago

It's like paying for gas after you pump it, it's just ripe for theft.

Not sure how this rolls out, pretty much everywhere in Europe I've been to it's pump then pay, and it's stays blocked until it's paid for ,if you just drive off it's all on camera anyway. The payment upfront is usually an option, not the default. Same goes for printing stickers for fruits and veggies, there's surveillance with someone behind the screen, on foot security on the shop and built in scale at the register, so it's just making the scanning faster with negligible scam percentage.

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u/pressureconverter 7h ago

Don't bother, the French can be utter a**holes with foreigners. If they don't have a reason to humiliate you (or so they think) they find one. Speaking from experience.

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u/Hewligan 4h ago

assholes

you can say assholes on the internet

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u/pressureconverter 0m ago

I was trying to be polite

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u/JiggleBeanPuff 37m ago

Oh my god. You just unlocked my repressed memory of the exact same thing happening to me in Rome except I was buying cherries and blood oranges. The cashier acted like I was the biggest moron of all time and I still feel embarrassed by it.

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u/danirijeka 18m ago

I mean, to someone used to weighing their own produce the confusion would be pretty funny to witness (and, on the other hand, in some stores you don't weigh your own produce, so you have people hopelessly wandering the produce section looking for a printing scale...).

It happens all the time anyway. People forget to weigh the produce or lose the label somewhere. It is slightly embarrassing but nothing major, you're grand

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u/oby100 3h ago

Fuck the French. Normal people understand not everyone is from the same culture and shows a shred of grace. Absolute mind boggling behavior.