The trouble is that there is nothing – bar hot air – in the bagging area, so you are stuck. The queue for being served by the human operators is shortening, yet you can’t do anything. You are stuck.
But Mrs Robot doesn’t give up. “Unexpected item in the bagging area,” she maintains.
After a few more seconds wait, she finally does accept there may be a problem. “An assistant is on its way,” she announces, but without any form of apology for the inconvenience you are currently facing.
The trouble is that Mrs Robot has promised you an assistant without checking who may be available. You soon realise that you are not the only person with error lights flashing at your terminal.
And you also then discover that the only person that is “trained” to help with the self-service checkout is at the far end of the store finding out whether the bacon Mrs Miggins wants to buy really is buy one, get one free.
Mrs Robot still promises that the “assistant is on its way” but you can’t see any progress. Meanwhile, the person who was at the back of the queue for the human operators when you started having problems is now happily walking out the store with their shopping.
It’s time for you too to join that queue and give up on your self-service adventure. What a waste of time.
Having had a particularly bad week of “unexpected items in the bagging area” I was thrilled to see some innovation in this technology during a visit to the Tesco Express store near St Paul’s today.
The self-service machine I was presented with was slick, modern and didn’t seem to have any silly mechanism that attempts to work out what your shopping should weigh (thus causing all the calibration problems that brings so much irritation to the good people of Britain).
The next generation of self-service checkouts
This is a welcome step-forward in the evolution of food shopping and I hope others follow suit and improve their self-service checkouts. My local Morrisons store needs to take particular note, as often only two out of their eight self-service machines are working. And even for the ones that are technically working, there is often that “unexpected” problem.
I once complained to Morrisons about the problem and was provided with the following nonsense response:
“Please be assured various provisions are made in our stores to make shopping easier and we cater for ‘express’ shopping by providing self serve machines. We believe that the system that we operate is as efficient as it can be without being over-strict in its regulation and we rely on our customers’ goodwill and co-operation in using this service.”
Tesco’s investment – by contrast – is very much an unexpected (but much welcomed) development in self-service checkouts.
Mark Gee 