Years ago, when I first encountered supermarket self-service checkouts, I decided that I would not be engaging with them. It was hate at first sight. Even the initial comic novelty of a disembodied voice warning of “unexpected items” in the baggage area or telling me that “help is coming” soon wore off. Something always went wrong with the machine or more accurately with my ability to scan barcodes. I’d end up asking the supermarket staff for assistance and feeling like a dope.
Ever since, I’ve looked admiringly at the people self-scanning their sweetcorn and rashers with expertise. Fair play to them. Knowing my limitations, I wheel my trolley or lug my basket to the old-fashioned checkout. Here, help is not “coming”. Help is already at hand in the form of a, usually, smiling human being.
Maybe self-service checkouts are a younger person’s game, but I don’t know that I’d have enjoyed them at any age. In London recently, I was forced to interact with one in a vast supermarket where there didn’t seem to be any conventional checkout options. I nearly came to blows with my neighbour at the next machine, who was visibly agitated because my frozen pizzas were spilling on to his purple sprouting broccoli. The general atmosphere around the self-scanning facilities was febrile and tense.
In protest at having been forced to use the self-service checkout against my will, I accidentally on purpose neglected to scan a carrier bag. Apparently, I am not alone in my petty pilfering. The self-service checkout era, designed to increase sales and reduce staffing costs, has reportedly resulted in a rise in shoplifting and carrier bags are the least of the supermarket giant’s worries. But even this has not stopped the relentless self-service tide.
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Still, there has been some customer pushback. One supermarket chain in the UK, Booths, has ditched the self-scanning machines because customers said they didn’t like them. Another, Asda, has expressed a commitment to increasing the number of old-school checkouts. But these are outliers, as far as I can see.
I noticed people seemed to be buying their own clothes without the help of a cashier. Self-service in the clothes shop. What was this sorcery?
In more hopeful news for us self-service refuseniks, in some countries there appears to be a move towards what some are calling “slow retail”. Two supermarket chains in France and the Netherlands, Carrefour and Jumbo, have in the past couple of years introduced slow checkout counters, designed to allow the shopper to take their time and actually have a chat with the checkout person.
In Jumbo these are called kletskassa (chat boxes) while in Carrefour, the purpose is even more clearly signposted: blablabla caisse or blablabla checkouts where you can indulge in as much blah or banter as you fancy. In Canada, one supermarket chain has introduced “slow social lanes” where there’s no need to rush and staff are trained to keep the conversation as well as the groceries flowing. The Dutch supermarket initiative is part of a government-backed campaign to combat loneliness. I wonder if they’ll catch on here.
I’ve been thinking about checkouts because of a recent experience in Zara. This is a shop I usually stay well away from. I associate Zara with one of my most glamorous and tall friends. Not being either glamorous or tall, I did not think it made clothes for the likes of me. As Ru Paul might put it, “Category is: short and roundy.”
On the hunt for a dress for a special occasion and having exhausted the three places in town where I can usually find something that will (a) fit me and which (b) isn’t covered in flowers, I wandered into a vast Zara not feeling hopeful. Within minutes though, I found a black party dress, a denim jacket and flowing maroon silk kaftanesque yoke, reduced from €50 to €6. I was delighted with myself, and headed to the dressingroom to see if they would actually work. They worked, even if admittedly I don’t know where or when I’ll get a chance to swish around in the maroon kaftan yoke.
Outside the dressingroom is where things got really interesting. I noticed people seemed to be buying their own clothes without the help of a cashier. Self-service in the clothes shop. What was this sorcery? Yes, I now realise, having breathlessly announced this “discovery” to several friends and my despairing teenage daughters, that this is old news. I’m told it’s been possible to self-checkout in many clothes shops, from Bershka to Penneys to H&M, for several years. But look, I’ve had a lot on lately and this innovation had completely passed me by.
I was also stunned to discover (more groans from my teenagers) that you can just put your items in the checkout bin and, automatically, without any barcode scanning, the amount you owe will appear on a screen. This, a lovely young Spanish shop assistant informed me, is due to something called radio frequency identification technology. The machine even knew that my €50 silk-adjacent extravaganza had been reduced to €6. Now, I had to take off the security tags myself, or at least ask the nice Spanish lady to do it for me, but it was seamless, the complete opposite to the self-service nightmare at the supermarket.
In fact, the whole experience was so delightful, I’ve had to rethink my long-held antipathy to the self-service model. So if you see a short, roundy lady in a satin kaftan struggling at the supermarket check out machine, do say hello.
