The supermarkets of today are horrid things. They're impersonal and serve only one purpose: to make consumers aware they need to consume (a word that seems to de-humanise human need, reducing it to terms understandable only by way of monetary value). If anything highlights this truism more it's those deeply dispiriting things we call self-service checkouts.
Whenever I enter a supermarket these days I sweat. I never buy more than a handful of items so I rarely use checkouts. How I miss the odd chinwag. Despite the blandness, indifference and, often, bitterness of some checkout assistants, I'd take them any day over a self-service checkout. Firstly, one approaches and waits for the thing to reset after the last mug has bagged their stuff and gone on their merry way. 'I'm ready for your custom now,' it says quite glaringly. The bigger items are a breeze, but try swiping a cream egg or searching frantically through the options for a chocolate choux bun.
After the swiping of each item, one is forced to bend down and bag each one. But that word, of course, just means plonk the item on that little, white plastic square and wait for the damn thing to shut up. At the end of the chore, it's time to pay up and get out.
With sweaty palms, I reach into my pocket and pull out some spare change, all the while some desperate-looking person behind me is looking for some bastard or another to hurry up and finish so he or she can get in there quick-smart and then get the hell out. I pull out some coins and begin to insert them, feeling quite insecure as I notice that there are mostly pennies in my hand. I look to see if any coins have been rejected by the machine and then re-insert the damn things if they have been.
Horrah! It's tendering the receipt! 'Receipt?' I think to myself. A receipt for four items totalling just over two pounds? Well, if you must, you daft machine, you! Inevitably, I scrunch the thing up but refrain from throwing it anywhere; instead allowing it to take its rest in the infinite receipt graveyard that is my jacket pocket.
I walk out to the escalator and wait behind a line of innumerous old biddies, all moving down the thing at 2 miles an hour with their trollies. 'Prepare to disembark from the escalator,' the thing announces. I inveterately laugh at this point but secretly cry; thus decrying the pathetic country in which I live.
I think about the future, when all local markets and grocers will have inevitably been crushed under the corporate foot of Britain's many supermarkets. I ponder a time when the supermarkets will possess all the lard in Britain and prepare to administer that lard around the gaping arsehole of the government before inserting their lengthy, blood-throbbing, corporate cocks into the orifice (not that that probably isn't done already). I think of a time in a few years when signs above checkouts will no longer read: 'Five items or less' - or 'fewer', depending on the literacy of supermarket executives at such a point - but rather: 'Five items or get the hell out of the shop and fuck off somewhere else.'
I can't wait for such a time, can you? But until then, I think I may just start using the regular checkouts again.
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