The truth about self-checkout
Unexpected ballache in the bagging area
I can find something to love and loathe about most things, in equal measure. In CONFLICTED, I critique a thing, person, or action – giving each side of the argument a mere 500 words to avoid then turning into rants. Sometimes there’s nothing wrong with sitting on the fence – at least you’ve got a seat.
This week: I look at self-checkout machines, the faceless weight-obsessed customer service agent that feeds our increasing desire never to talk to anyone, and even gives us a well-positioned selfie camera so we can check our makeup.
WHY I LOVE THEM
Other than the job I have now, my all-time favourite period of employment was working on the cigarette kiosk at a supermarket as a sixth former. It was not the most physically or intellectually demanding job, but it came with a crumb or two of power – something I’d had precious little of growing up – and I discovered what it was truly like to give somebody something they really wanted more than anything. Aside from getting to do announcements on the in-store bing-bong and hearing my extremely affected Margo Leadbetter impression bouncing off the high ceilings, the best part of the job was scanning.
Call it mindless if you like, but grazing the beady-eye of a laser through several layers of shiny glass was more therapeutic for me than any mindfulness app I’ve tried in the ensuing years. Beep. Beep. Hitting the buttons – physical ones, none of these virtual touchpad ones that only pretend to quiver at your touch – and watching the till automatically fly open was always a pleasure, never a chore, so perhaps I’m reaching for my past glories when I inevitably, invariably select a faceless self-checkout over a smiling cashier.
It’s not just about speed, but privacy, somehow. Your products are whisked from the basket – or, more usually, a precarious cradle made of my own arms because I hate baskets – then scanned and plonked straight into the bag (if you prepare the bag properly, as I try to do). Use the cashier, and it becomes very public. Unloading your shopping onto a conveyor belt is the retail equivalent of getting your junk out in a green-circle selfie on your socials: it practically begs for judgement.
The cashier may well be immune to bonkers shopping basket combos by now, barely blinking at a basketful of courgettes, Vaseline, coconut oil, Brasso, rawlplugs and a New York cheesecake, but the shoppers behind and in front will certainly profile you, take stealth shots and make you TikTok famous with the hashtags #quietnightin and #youwillstretchtoo. What else is there to do in the queue other than look at your phone? And as for the silent battle of wills over whether responsibility for placing the ‘next customer please’ divider lies with you or the person before/behind you… well, it’s not hard to see why self-checkouts became more popular.
The don of all shopping experiences, though, is self-scan, the only time in your life you get to wander a supermarket brandishing a ray-gun where you won’t be taken out by firearms officers. Gliding the aisles, a bag for life over each shoulder, scanning with my Star Trek tech and then plonking my cans of beans right into the bag like a common shoplifter – I feel invincible, like nothing can stop me. And indeed, nothing can, except for the dreaded enforced re-scan, which provides a very unwelcome surge of cortisol. Still, it’s worth it to feel in charge of your own destiny, notching up Nectar points, spiritually braless, giving late-stage capitalism one last soggy blowie.
WHY I HATE THEM
“Hell is empty and all the devils are here”, says The Tempest’s Prospero standing in the queue for a self-checkout in H&M, behind someone who’s been trying since Ted Heath was in government to locate the barcode on a pair of socks with “GO BANANAZ” stitched onto the cuff. The concept of a self-checkout is fairly simple and must sound wonderful in executive committee meetings, but the execution is almost always disastrous.
First the old-fashioned ’10 items or fewer’ aisles in the supermarket went driverless – convenient, but not very nice watching people lose their jobs to an over-promoted iPad – and now, first chance they get, retailers are ripping ing out tills and installing scanner guns and ‘self packing’ areas. Self-checkouts aim to speed up the process of frisking you for cash and depositing you back onto the street with little to no human contact, but if anything they only increase frustrating interactions.
First of all, you’re invited to use your own bag and place it in the ‘bagging area’, which resembles a sheet of non-specific metal or plastic but is actually a highly volatile and sensitive sentient worktop with serious trust issues that has never met a soul it didn't want to crush. Your bag, it appears, is the wrong kind of bag, is it even a bag? Why are you lying? What’s in there? Over comes a colleague to liberate you from temporary purgatory with a scrunched up receipt upon which is a barcode – the self-checkout’s favourite drug other than watching you squirm on the security camera. Next, uh-oh, that can of beans you just packed feels pretty heavy, wise guy; are you sure you’re not sneaking a bottle of Calvados into that alleged bag of yours? Back again comes the colleague to thump some buttons. Then you scan your bottle of Blue Nun. Nuh-uh, hands against the wall, bitch, you might be old enough to remember Céline Dion’s original teeth but according to the checkout’s records you’re 15, time to alert a colleague. The jaded shop worker, who dreams of plunging an axe into the heart of the self-checkout, will tap ‘over 25’ without even looking at you; they could smell the Werther’s Originals ten feet away.
Now the plague has reached other shops. Boots collars you for ONE box of paracetamol and vomits a tree’s worth of No.7 vouchers at you. H&M, whose tills were first used by Walter Raleigh to track his potato imports, leaves you helpless trying to detag your jeans, while one remaining sales assistant scurries between four tills. IKEA’s self-checkouts see customers who’ve never been outside before grapple with flatpack wardrobes. (A serious point: if you’re neurodivergent or have a physical disability, these contraptions must be a nightmare.) Only Uniqlo’s self-checkouts are elite – you drop everything into a hole (I’ll pause here for innuendo-related polite laughter) and it automatically tots up how much you owe.
Either give us a discount for self-scanning or get bodies back behind counters, I beg you.
ENCORE
I wrote a guest post for
’s Substack about my (mainly teenage) crushes, including Jake Gyllenhaal and the one boy at school who wasn’t exactly a god but at least he was civil to me. It was a lot of fun and the writing is quite nice. READ NOWI reviewed this week’s Guardian Blind Date too and on reading it back a couple of days later, I have to say it’s pretty weird (the date, not the review; my review is great). READ NOW
Your description of the bagging area is a triumph and also I am a massive fan of the Uniqlo hole (they’re like that in Decathlon too, except you have to try and cram a tennis racket and a canoe in them). I give this five beeps
The cameras are the worst, my local Waitrose & Co-op (I go in each as little as possible) have TERRIBLE lighting. I really don’t need to see my harried face lit by fluorescent. Re the sequinned Auntie in the Blind Date review, is this a teaser for your dark novels? Absolutely would read.