Please find pricing labels that stick well enough to do their job, and the customer can get off without too much work.
Thanks!
P.S. In an unrelated matter, Grammarly suggested rewriting that second sentence this way:
Please find pricing labels that adhere well enough to perform their intended function, yet can be easily removed by the customer without excessive effort.
Which is better? (Note: I’m posting this thing in a rush between runs to a Costco an hour away from here.)
They should disintegrate at removal not stick forever. They are made so sticky to prevent customers from swapping them to more expensive items.
Problem is, they don’t disintegrate at removal. Getting them completely off is mostly a pain.
But it could be what I’m asking isn’t possible.
„Better“ is hard to say. Grammarly’s is perhaps more formal and technically correct, but yours is more concise while imho understandable.
I interact with people in multiple languages and origins/backgrounds. One thing we always find about English is that ‘understandability’ in everyday usage is more important than ‘correctness’. Users of some other languages give you the ‘ignorant foreigner’ treatment if usage is not technically or regionally correct.
Also important in customer service is civility so I applaud your starting the comment to Goodwill with ‘Please’!
You’re aware of that other meaning of “the customer can get off without too much work”, right?
Your version is vastly superior
Thanks! It’s still not perfect, but what is?
What makes my version better is that it’s mine. Not some AI’s imposition of grammatical rules and learned typicalities.
What we call AI is a database of nearly all published human expression, with a massive amount of programming toward recognizing patterns, and making sense of those patterns—typicalities all—through language, art, mathematics, and code. While this may seem brain-like, it isn’t fully human, just as recognizing patterns and acting on them isn’t fully human. Yes, we do all that, but that’s not who and what we are. Who we are is profoundly individual, and what we are is more than meat. That “more” cannot be reduced or fully defined.
For lack of a better word, what and who we are is a being with a soul: a spirit wearing a space suit. That the suit is made of meat doesn’t make it less of a suit. We wear it until it fails. What we do next is unknowable. Religion may be the best help we have for that, but all religions are collections of stories, all of which say both less and more than whatever facts they might contain. On the less side there is what stories leave out. On the more side is what Father Seán ÓLaoire (source as well of the spirits-in-spacesuits metaphor) says: “There are some truths only stories can tell.”
AI can make up stories. But they don’t know them in fully human ways.
Grammarly will never know me, no matter how much or well it follows my writing. Same goes for ChatGPT and the other Big AI companies. They may pretend (not think) they know me. But they are not any of us, and never will be.
Just a thought. Or a small collection of them.
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