Now, I know that as a massive luddite and technological Johnny-come-lately what I have to say is likely akin to many of you to a weighty 24-year-old man wheezing through the story of losing his virginity, but I am here today to tell you that I recently had my very first encounter with the peril of self-scanning checkouts. All previous shopping attempts had been undertaken in the comforting knowledge that there would be a teenager to shout at come the end of the journey, and that by shouting at that teenager all my wishes would come true. Not so with self-scan checkouts, and the awful contraptions know this.
They know that you are trapped at their cold, mechanical mercy. There is no recourse to appeal if it decides your wheel of Brie is actually a new Citroën Berlingo, there is no button to tell it the unrecognized items in it’s bagging area are your legs, and there is no indicated way of summoning help when the infernal machine swallows your credit card, forcing you to stand in the aisle, the broken debris of your shopping existence all around you, attempting cashier semaphore with a pair of frozen pizzas. They are horrible.
It was my fault, really. I accept blame completely. It was my fault for taking it into my head that I should do my weekly shopping bored at 4am on a Saturday morning, whisking myself off to Tesco’s subconsciously expecting some unfortunate wage-slave to still be there to bag my fish and not turning back the moment I found only stern-eyed eastern European security staring back at me like this was Srebrenica’s answer to Poundland.
But, dear readers, there was an upside, and I don’t just mean the chicken salad sandwich and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups - recommended to me by an American friend, and easily the most deliciously unhealthy things on the planet - which I bought myself as a reward. No, the upside of my late night shopping adventure is that I discovered that, no matter how weird you might be compared to those of us who dwell in the daylight hours, we are all great bastions of sanity up to the sort of people you find in Tesco’s at 4am on a Saturday morning. Yours truly disappointingly not excepted.
It’s hard to pick out a favourite, though. Was it the astonishingly red-faced man who’s shopping seemed to consist only of innumerable pepperoni pizzas? Was it the wild-eyed woman wheeling her bicycle adorned with Meat is Murder stickers through the pork and beef aisle, greedily scooping packs of chops and mince into it’s front basket? Was it the screaming children running up and down the DVD aisle, who I now know to be there on such a round-the-clock basis that it must surely be some sort of paid shift work for the under-10s? I have never felt so gloriously out of place.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. Sleep deprivation will do strange things to people and perhaps the man with the armfuls of frozen pizza works such unsociable hours that this is his only time to shop and the pizzas are the only food he has time to cook. Perhaps the children in the DVD aisle are just bored out of their minds that their parents have seen fit for some bizarre reason to bring them to Tescos at four in the morning. Perhaps the woman with the meat-filled vegan bicycle just has an under-appreciated sense of irony. I will never know, I was too scared to look them in the eye.
It did remind me, though, of how much we all worry about fitting in. We all consciously or unconsciously worry about how we look, how we come across to others, and how we could improve. Any magazine you care to read tells you that some eighty-something percent of people are unhappy with some part of themselves, and perhaps it’s just human nature to worry about not fitting in with the pack, but honestly, next time this fear takes hold of you, grasps you in your tenderest place, please don’t go out and buy a £500 haircut, just take an early-morning drive to your nearest 24hr Tescos. You’ll have never felt so normal.
They know that you are trapped at their cold, mechanical mercy. There is no recourse to appeal if it decides your wheel of Brie is actually a new Citroën Berlingo, there is no button to tell it the unrecognized items in it’s bagging area are your legs, and there is no indicated way of summoning help when the infernal machine swallows your credit card, forcing you to stand in the aisle, the broken debris of your shopping existence all around you, attempting cashier semaphore with a pair of frozen pizzas. They are horrible.
It was my fault, really. I accept blame completely. It was my fault for taking it into my head that I should do my weekly shopping bored at 4am on a Saturday morning, whisking myself off to Tesco’s subconsciously expecting some unfortunate wage-slave to still be there to bag my fish and not turning back the moment I found only stern-eyed eastern European security staring back at me like this was Srebrenica’s answer to Poundland.
But, dear readers, there was an upside, and I don’t just mean the chicken salad sandwich and the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups - recommended to me by an American friend, and easily the most deliciously unhealthy things on the planet - which I bought myself as a reward. No, the upside of my late night shopping adventure is that I discovered that, no matter how weird you might be compared to those of us who dwell in the daylight hours, we are all great bastions of sanity up to the sort of people you find in Tesco’s at 4am on a Saturday morning. Yours truly disappointingly not excepted.
It’s hard to pick out a favourite, though. Was it the astonishingly red-faced man who’s shopping seemed to consist only of innumerable pepperoni pizzas? Was it the wild-eyed woman wheeling her bicycle adorned with Meat is Murder stickers through the pork and beef aisle, greedily scooping packs of chops and mince into it’s front basket? Was it the screaming children running up and down the DVD aisle, who I now know to be there on such a round-the-clock basis that it must surely be some sort of paid shift work for the under-10s? I have never felt so gloriously out of place.
Perhaps I am being too harsh. Sleep deprivation will do strange things to people and perhaps the man with the armfuls of frozen pizza works such unsociable hours that this is his only time to shop and the pizzas are the only food he has time to cook. Perhaps the children in the DVD aisle are just bored out of their minds that their parents have seen fit for some bizarre reason to bring them to Tescos at four in the morning. Perhaps the woman with the meat-filled vegan bicycle just has an under-appreciated sense of irony. I will never know, I was too scared to look them in the eye.
It did remind me, though, of how much we all worry about fitting in. We all consciously or unconsciously worry about how we look, how we come across to others, and how we could improve. Any magazine you care to read tells you that some eighty-something percent of people are unhappy with some part of themselves, and perhaps it’s just human nature to worry about not fitting in with the pack, but honestly, next time this fear takes hold of you, grasps you in your tenderest place, please don’t go out and buy a £500 haircut, just take an early-morning drive to your nearest 24hr Tescos. You’ll have never felt so normal.
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