Checking Out

There's an unexpected item in the bagging area.

Portrait of Charles and Georges Durand-Ruel by Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1882)

“He’s got a problem with potatoes,” said the condemned, guarding the self-checkout machines. Potatoes plague them. Carrier bags flummox them. ‘Surprising item on the scale,’ it squeaked as if I were weighing up a kilo of black-tar heroin.

The retirement refusenik tapped a code on the screen for the third occasion before returning to his post. ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area.’ Embarrassed, I marshalled my friend—the Hobbity, amenable man with the silver slugs for eyebrows—for the fourth time. He recanted a well-worn sop dispensed to young dotards like me: “Don’t take it personally,” he said. “He just doesn’t like you.”

Self-checkouts are not quite Skynet T-800 death dealers. Sarah Connor can rest easy—for now.

After a little while, the machine let me go. The ordeal, fractious and infinitely slower than employing the helpful man to man a till, was over. Then, the devil-device sucker-punched square in the testes.

“Lovely to see you bye for now,” read the screen. Sinister, like a Jehovah’s Witness grinning. No comma after the introductory clause?! The insolent swine. I fought the primal urge to drown the machine in Coca-Cola and watch it crackle. The clean-up would be Harold’s job. He had enough on his plate.

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Mercifully, one supermarket has sacked these silly machines.

Booths, a posh retailer up north, has retired self-checkouts in all but two of their stores. The good burghers of Booths reckon humans talking to other humans is a groundbreaking idea that will catch on in future.

“We have based this not only on what we feel is the right thing to do but also from having received feedback from our customers,” they said.

“Delighting customers with our warm northern welcome is part of our DNA.”

Wearily, Booths did what British northerners must do lest they spontaneously combust—they peacocked their northernness. Apparently, to be born on a particular patch of this floating rock bestows northerners an umbilical, friendly mien.

Northerners cannot help themselves. POV: You encounter a northerner in a pub: “A malignant tumour, you say? You wanna get yourself a northern tumour. Northern tumours are far less aggressive than those bloody southern tumours. It’s a fact! Northern tumours still have a sense of community, you see. Not like southern tumours…”

I must forgive them. Booth's ‘northern welcome’ is a good thing. Entities imbued with DNA are a good thing. Even one fewer self-service checkout is a good thing.

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From where Booth’s tread, others may follow. The numbers don’t tell fibs.

Self-checkouts mutate even the most cherubic of citizens into a degenerate thief. Stores with self-service checkouts suffer double the shrinkage (4%) — industry-speak for pilfering and thieving.

Researchers say the temptation can prove too much, provoking our inner tea leaf into a spot of half-inching. Self-checkouts goad miscreants into slapping a ‘Reduced to £1’ sticker on a litre of Jameson.

Booths have bucked a trend. A fatuous, anti-human trend.

During the pandemic, a time of popular delusion and mass neurosis, an idea took root: humans were vectors of disease to be avoided, scowled at, and shunned. This suspicion lingers on.

Essentially, tech giants whose face-hugger apps wrap themselves around our heads for four, five, six and even 12 hours daily share this suspicion. Listen to what these people say and the futures they imagine.

You’ll work from home, order a no-contact lunch, and run all your errands on a one-stop-shop super app. After work, you’ll log into a Zoom cardio class and sweat through a screen with thousands of strangers you’ll never meet.

Done? You’ll scroll through the evening on Netflix or chat to a hologram. Your robot bed companion doesn’t do that thing you like the way you like it? Update his/her software. (Settings: Promiscuous; French.)

You’ll seldom endure another human being ever again. Isn’t that what everyone wants? No, it is not. Freud said neurosis is the inability to tolerate ambiguity. The illustration above is an unambiguous, paint-by-numbers composition brushed into life by an obvious neurotic.

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Most of our modern maladies flow from the same fount: that devil device psychically stitched to your palm.

Scrolling away the days, entombed in curated lives, we’ve developed Main Character Syndrome. We are each the main characters in a drama. Everyone else is the audience. Like TV, social media offers each and every one of us the chance to be the main character in what Saul Bellow called ‘a shot at eternity.’

But TV fame was roped-off to all but a few. One had to abide by certain rules; even then, only a select few graced the screen.

Now, we have our own production crews. We are the director, boom operator, publicist, and protagonist.

It’s gone horribly wrong. We’ve turned into the most entitled of prima donnas.

A busy waitress failed to greet you with North Korean enthusiasm. One-star review!  A novel you’ve half-read didn’t validate your political-psychological obsessions? Ha! Could the so-called author be any more of an idiot?! A girl with whom you’ve matched hasn’t replied yet? Well, fuck you—gaslighting selfish narcissist!

And so on. And so on. Beneath this tsunami of cultural road rage, our ability to connect with others lay smashed amongst the rocks. Spoiler: we cannot all play the main character on a planet of seven billion.

In his theory of play, the British psychologist John Bowlby outlines something we’ve forgotten. Growing up, children need to play with others. This isn’t some lark to keep them quiet when the football is on. It’s how they become a person. Reader, I feel as if I’m explaining that water falling from the sky is called rain. We’re losing what makes us human.

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That brings me back to my distasteful encounter with that semi-literate oaf of a machine.

You can roll your eyes and call me a Grammar Nazi. It’s a false term. It should be Grammar Saint. The point — if you will allow me, reader — is not whether your grammar is correct but whether you made an effort.

For the same reason, we iron out glaring creases in our shirts and brush our bed-heads into order. Suggesting that Senator Fetterman, an admittedly solid chap of late, should wear a suit and tie is not borne of small-town sadism. It’s a display of submission. Not the religious kind of submission in Houellebecq novels but the humble kind that recognises other people exist. Despite our Cult of You, we are not alone.

The same is true of small talk. Bores talk bollocks about the weather, not for the content but for the signal. Nobody cares about the everyday weather. Small talk—it pains me to admit such heresy past my fingertips—is a social glue that binds people together. ‘This bloody weather, eh?’ means, ‘I am here, and you are, too.’ (It took me over thirty years to realise that. Please excuse me if this revelation was obvious to everyone but me.)

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Perspicacious readers might say my foul language is hardly helpful or civilising. Your Honour, I object. Used sparingly, swearwords add an emphasis unfound across the lexicon. What motivates the weather bores motivates me, too.

If I sound like a Luddite, then good. Contrary to popular misconception, the Luddites did not smash machines out of primitive fear of progress. They opposed a future which would erode their humanity and wane their freedom. They feared a faceless, soulless, tasteless future.  They had a point.

And so do Booths, the conquerors of the machines. Everyone knows this except for the machines. They still have a problem with potatoes.

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