The customer is always......

I think it’s time for a rant – haven’t had one for a while!

For the last few years I have favoured our local Co-op. We have a small one that opened 5 or 6  years ago, closer than any other supermarket, mini or otherwise. They stocked good quality food at reasonable prices. And it was close; convenient.

The Sainsbury’s I used to go to was a bit further, but had, for many years, served me well. Every now and then I still go in there, but in recent times, I do so only if I have to. Every time I shop in our little Sainsbury’s, I feel my life is shortened a few notches.

It’s the ‘serve yourself’ tills that do it.

Of course, we all know that plastic bags are bad for the environment. I, like many people (and in all probability, like my grandparents and great grandparents) now leave the house with a shopping bag or 5 to pack the vitals procured from my ‘greengrocers’.

The difference of course, is that my great grandma (it was, let’s face it, most likely she that did the shopping, whilst great grandad was out hunting boar, swigging ale with his compatriots or whatever he got up to) would deal with real people. Shopkeepers, who would know their products, make recommendations and have a chat whilst filling your shopping bag are consigned to history.

Today, we traipse round a shop, picking our own products from the shelves. Those of us that are honest enough to actually pay for our shopping then subject ourselves to the ignominy of self-checkout.

If you deign to do as we are encouraged and bring your own bags, the first step is to declare them – you press a button “I’m using my own bags”.

You are then invited to place your bags in the bagging area.

My gripe with Sainsbury’s is that at that point, all trust is lost.

The system instantly assumes that if you happen to use a backpack to carry your heavy load home, that you must be trying to scam them -  it rejects anything heavier than a gossamer thin paper bag.

You then have to wait for a member of staff, who has to find a moment to divert themselves from doing someone else’s online shopping, to come and engage that little button tag they all have on a skiers retractable cord, to validate your bags as being real, not a chicken you tried to sneak through the tills by claiming it was a shopping bag.

Then - god forbid - you might want to buy some alcohol!

Though we are all being filmed by the tills whilst we endure this ordeal, facial recognition being what it is, it can’t seem to recognise that the wrinkles and lines accumulate over sixty years on this planet make it laughably implausible that I am under the age of 18 (or even 40… 50? Come on – give me a break! ) and require a pimpled youth to verify I’m a wrinkly, so I can purchase a bottle of wine.

And so it is, that the Sainsbury’s experience has been infuriating enough for me to avoid the shop in recent times, lest it raise my blood pressure to coronary attack levels.

The Co-op, by contrast has (until recently) been a breeze.

I wafted in, collected my goods around the store. The checkout recognised that I have a backpack with sufficient fortitude to stand the journey home. Rarely was a staff member troubled by my presence in the store, unless of course I was buying a bottle of tipple, in which case they calmly and promptly appeared to approve my purchase.

But what has happened in the last few weeks?

Co-op have, to my chagrin, taken a leaf out of Sainsbury’s book.

The tills no longer happily accept my backpack as a legitimate vessel in which to purvey my vitals home.

Neigh!

They now reject my bags and declare me infidel!

I was in the Co-op this week, and for the third time in recent visits, my backpack was rejected, with the cheerful message “An assistant will be along to help you soon”.

The bloke next to me found himself in the same situation. We were both standing there looking around for an assistant and none was to be found.

Other shoppers gradually arrived at the tills. Seeing our plight, a spontaneous conversation broke out – can you imagine that! Strangers having a conversation! - Totally unheard of south of Birmingham!

Conversation centered around the shoplifting epidemic that has struck the Co-op in recent times.

Last time I was in there, I witnessed a police constable  (we used to call them WPCs, but I think that police constable is the correct term these days) wrestled with a drugged up ‘shopper’ (aka thief) trying to flee the store with a stash of goodies.

This was, to be fair, a refreshing sight. It seemed that supermarkets had given up on the idea of ‘customers’ paying for goods and just become a ‘help yourself to anything you fancy’ emporium. Our heroic PC was making a stand for justice and the honest shopper!

This latest visit was the most shocking confirmation of how bad things have become.

For 30 seconds or so, I waited patiently for a staff member to appear. Then I went walkabout, looking down the aisles, but to no avail.

I’ll confess, I considered just packing my shopping in my bag and walking out. No-one would have noticed, or probably cared. But I wasn’t brought up that way!

So I shouted out “Are there any staff in here? Could you help please?”

Eventually a staff member came and verified that my bag wasn’t a stollen chicken and I set about doing the work that shopkeepers used to to do - scanning and packing my shopping.

At the end, I was all ready to pay, when the system told me it had to verify my age.

Seriously?

If I had been under-age when I arrived, I would most certainly be old enough by the time I’d managed to get to the end of the checkout process!

This got me thinking that all the so-called productivity improvements, which are making things more efficient and cheaper for us to shop are not doing that at all.

They are piling the burden of what we used to call work onto what we still laughingly call ‘the customer’. We are now all working for the supermarkets that we pay for the privilege of buying goods from them, whilst those high on crack or pissed on booze they nicked the last time they were in, waft in and out, helping themselves to what they want, with no-one to challenge them, save our heroic WPC.

Now we have the next exciting thing to look forward to – Artificial intelligence! Where will that take us? Maybe I’ll tackle that another time….

That’s a longer rant than I’ve had for a while, so I’ll stop now.

What is it that keeps me going?

Need you ask?

The smiles of Little Ray of Sunshine, who turned 2 years old this week.

Her birthday effectively started about a month ago, with her shared party (a genius move by her mum Hija to roll three friends’ two year old birthday parties into one). It has stretched out with presents appearing on a daily basis for the last week or so. I just hope that LRS can accept that presents don’t continue to appear every day!

The day after her birthday she was struck down by a fever and Mrs A had to go round and comfort her, so Hija could do some work. It lasted until yesterday, Halloween, when she dressed up as a skeleton and had great fun handing out sweeties to the local hustlers coming round ‘trick or treat’ing.

Innocent pleasures!

Wouldn’t it be lovely to be as carefree as a two year old again?

That’s it for this week.

Have a good ‘un,

Jerry