Just been to my local Sainsbury’s to buy ingredients needed for Maricel to cook one of her Filipino dishes. They have these unmanned check outs where you swipe the items yourself, then pay with cards or cash. I think they’re great, it cuts down on the human contact, the false smiles, the pretending the children of the person in front of the queue aren’t annoying. The first time we used it we had some check out boy try to show us how. It looked simple enough, swipe the thing over and put it in the bag, but if we were slightly delayed in following the instructions of the machine, he’d try snatching the item off us to swipe it himself. There’s nothing more annoying than a person who tries helping when his pissy help isn’t needed, and I felt like checking if the machine would read his teeth as a barcode. Maybe he was number one on the “useless check out assistants we’ll sack first if the plebs work out how to work those machines” list. Either way, he was taking the fun out of the exercise and I told him so. He left after that, probably to cry over the frozen foods. You knew that he’d be the first to go in this revolution. Only the strongest check out assistants would survive; the stroppy ones that lobbed your items down the conveyor, hoping they’d be lost forever under a deluge of loose plastic bags; or the ones that openly sucked their teeth at you if you took too much time handling your money. Today, they had one man looking over the four check points to see if anyone was cheating, it looked like a GCSE exam. Something told me he wasn’t going to jump up if some senile old dear swipes the same tin of cat food fifty times, “I’m sorry madam, the screen says £67.80 and the screen never lies.”
I warn you once more, through pitting machines against long suffering check out assistants we will only breed monsters. Let’s just hope the fuckers don’t join forces.