For Whom the Till Tolls
By Steve Sharp
It is only a few years ago now that the cash till in our local was nothing more than a wooden drawer slung under the rear counter. No one paid by card. John, the tenant landlord, would work out his cellar order with notebook and pencil and phone it in.
Today, the pub is the same, but the till is electronic, and no cash is taken. Card only. The till knows what has been sold and a system called Rockpool spirits the order to the brewery. Progress. Or is it?
Meanwhile, yesterday we were in a small local supermarket which has two self-service tills and two staffed ones, with just one of the latter operating.
A family of three, daughter in charge, were scanning through a large basket full, which could only be accommodated in the bagging area by building a Jenga tower of shopping. Dad tried to help by removing a precariously balanced bag of potatoes, with the inevitable consequences of rebuke from both the machine and his offspring.
The increasing queue grew restless and the unfortunate family, who were just trying to do a bit of essential food shopping left, totally stressed out.
There appears to be one group of people who like these bits of kit. Shoplifters.
Rod Liddle, he of the Sunday Times, made this literal observation…
A recent hobby of mine is to stand near the self-service tills in my local supermarket and watch the skanks nicking stuff. The usual trick is to waft whatever item, a bottle of Archers, a family pack of Monster Munch, a job lot of frozen pies made from recovered meat by-products past the scanner, but with the barcode facing in the opposite direction. Nobody cares. Certainly not the poor harassed checkout assistant who has to oversee about 10 tills and is probably averse to being glassed in the middle of her shift.
It's not just the absence of punishment that made shoplifting effectively legal in this benighted country, it's also the absence of people.
He goes on to discuss the general lack of interaction with people leading to the latest culprit reducing life expectancy, that of loneliness.
There were three banks in our town, (there is even a passage from the high street to the church called Bank Alley) the last one closes this month.
Banking online, shopping online; thank goodness you can’t get a haircut online, but perhaps it's only a matter of time.
Boots has now gone to war on the shoplifters by using surveillance technology and Big Brother tactics.
To quote Patrick Tooher in The Mail Online,
A store assistant sounds the alarm about a potential shoplifter. Within seconds, an operator watching live, from behind a bank of screens at a control centre 100 miles away issues a stern warning over a loudspeaker.
‘This is Boots CCTV’, he booms in a strong northern accent. ‘This store is being monitored and recorded. Any evidence of theft will be given to the police.’
The formerly unsuspecting suspect looks up at the camera, removes the items from a bag, calmly puts them back on the shelf and walks out.
Boots gets 650 alarms a day!
Tesco is trialling what it calls ‘magic tills’ which shoppers won't have to scan the barcodes on before paying and allowing them to skip self-checkout queues.
Customer will be given a list of items the store thinks they've picked up, which they can check is correct before paying on their phone.
One can only imagine the shoplifters rubbing their hands at this innovation.
Meanwhile, good old Booths, the upmarket, up North supermarket has ditched its self-service tills to huge praise from its customers and indeed the rest of us.
It might cost a bit more for humans to serve customers, but I’ll wager it earns them a good few more and encourages the scoundrels to steer clear and go to Tesco instead.
Steve