You've reached the end of the supermarket. You're in the ultimate state of depression: they didn't have any chocolate covered Hobnobs, you only have three items and there are queues four people deep at every single check out and ... Coronation Street is starting in twenty minutes. You trudge all the way to the other end of the supermarket, hoping, praying, that the basket queues are shorter. You have two options: let someone else do the hard work but possibly miss Coronation Street or ... take on those self-service checkouts ... There's a wedding and a murder in this one episode: shocker. You can't miss this ... It's the only option.
There's only one person in front of you. You can do this. You're going to make it. You step up, press start ...
'Please start scanning your items'. Okay, if you insist. Oh isn't this clever, those suckers queueing ...
'Place your items in the bagging area'. Okay, putting it in the bag ...
'Unexpected item in bagging area'
What? You should be expecting this, you told me to put it in there.
'Please remove the item'
Fine, taking it out of the bag ...
'Please don't remove items from bagging area'
Oh my God, putting it back in the bagging area ...
'Unexpected item in bagging area'
WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
'Please wait for assistance'
You're getting angry. This has already taken you five minutes. The till monitor is giving you dirty looks. You're trying to get her attention but she's ignoring you. She hates her job. She's missing Coronation Street too. You're the hundredth idiot she's had to assist today. She drifts over not uttering a word, just scowling. She whips out her card for the elite, scans it, taps in a code. Simple as that. The plain Hobnobs are in the bag. Now on to the milk ... beep ...
'Unexpected item in bagging area'
WHY GOD WHY?
Self-Service checkouts are becoming a regular feature in our supermarkets. They started innocently, just one or two for the ambitious and impatient of us, but I recently walked into my local supermarket to find shelf upon shelf of hand held scanners to allow you to scan your entire shop as you go round. Before long there will be no need for any staff; instead of creating jobs, we're eliminating them with unnecessary robots.
I have never liked these machines not because I'm a technophobe, not because I'm lazy but because they never work and quite frankly I object to paying the ever increasing prices for groceries when I'm having to do everything myself. These people get paid more than the rest of us for purely standing there scowling at customers, scanning my items is the least they can do.
However, despite them being, in my opinion, one of the most useless creations known to Man, there are times when I am willing to increase my blood pressure in using them. For example, when the cashier is very clearly some socially challenged, crazy cat lady who just wants to talk about her cats for half an hour, or when the person in front of you is an absolute imbecile who's forgotten half their shop, and picked up several items without bar codes. My favourite though is when the cashier kindly informs them it's buy one get one free and despite them very clearly not needing or wanting another packet of ham, as the sell by date is only two days away, they still have to go back to get one because it's free. What they don't realise however is that it's not free, they've simply increased the price of one packet of ham to justify giving the other one away for free.
I'm not even going to try and defend the fact that this is a rant today. I went to Tesco for two cartons of milk and some garlic bread and ended up spending more time trying to scan the items than actually finding them in the supermarket. Next time, the only 'unexpected item in the bagging area' will be probably be my fist.
