Three cheers for Booths! Actually I've never been in a
Booths store; this supermarket chain is quite small, with only twenty-eight
outlets in the North Country , but it has just done
something really radical. It has taken away the automated checkouts in its
shops and replaced them with good old fashioned human beings. As Charlie
Chaplin once said: "a machine shouldn't speak for men!" Automatic
checkouts are everywhere these days. There is a Marks and Spencer convenience
grocer in London 's Victoria Station
that has nothing but; and only one of those auto-tills takes cash. London
is particularly bad generally for this sort of thing. Here is the heroic Piers
Corbyn telling one of these Davos ration distributors exactly what he thinks of
them: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/EIb0fvo4rjg.
I've used auto-checkouts a couple of times and I dislike them a lot. A robotic
voice instructs you to scan the barcode of each of your items and then you put
the money in a slot, or more usually tap your bank card. Often something goes
wrong or the machine thinks you've put your carrier bag in the wrong place etc,
so almost every minute or so somebody asks for help from an assistant. Also you
can't buy alcohol or tobacco products unless an assistant confirms that you're
old enough. Computers can't do that yet. Booths' managing director Nigel
Murray, said: "Our customers have
told us that the self-scan machines can be slow and unreliable. They're
obviously impersonal (my emphasis)... We believe colleagues
serving customers delivers a better customer experience and therefore we have
taken the decision to remove self-checkouts in the majority of our stores. We
are a business that prides ourselves on the high standards and high levels of warm, personal care (my emphasis)".
Source: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-67373472.
Based Booths! This is just one small step in the right direction, but at least
it is in the right direction. Just for once, the warm and personal has
triumphed over the callous and efficient. Hopefully more shops will follow
suit. There is a petition with over 250,000 signatures asking Tesco to ditch
its auto-tills. I am impressed how in the grocer I use the most, The
Cooperative in Oxford , the queues
for the human tills are getting longer and the mechanical ones are less
popular. I don't mind waiting; it's a sign of healthy change.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/10/have-we-passed-peak-cashless.html.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2023/10/have-we-passed-peak-cashless.html.