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sacked from Tesco three times, the second time for guessing the prices (a pre-barcode world,
kids!), I have an affinity for low-level supermarket employee truculence.
Up to a point, that is. Things have changed in our local Super U, 'progress' has reared its
ugly head and it just doesn't feel right. The self-service till has become something of a com-
edy cliché in a very short space of time, with most comedians having their own variant on the
'unexpected item in the bagging area' line. I know. I'm one of them. But while the self-ser-
vice till has become ubiquitous in UK shops it is a rare thing indeed in France, especially in
rural backwaters like ours. Until recently, that is. My own view is that they are actually not
providing the speed of service that they are supposed to and are just another way for people
to avoid any sort of human interaction with each other. Granted, checkout tills are operated
either by the very young, who grunt at you and avoid eye contact fearing that they will be
aged immediately just by looking at you, or the retired who, in my experience, only work on
supermarket tills so that they can be judgemental about your purchases and mutter about the
modern world going 'to hell in a handcart'.
But I prefer both of those options to the smooth-voiced female bullying you to get on a self-
service till, and if the argument is to cut down on the number of staff needed then that palp-
ably doesn't work either. On the face of it, self-service tills are giving the customer a level
of autonomy, we are being 'trusted' - well, if that's the case why are there so many 'customer
service agents' hanging around like guard dogs in a junk yard looking at you suspiciously,
ready to pounce? The supermarkets don't trust their own staff on the tills and they don't trust
us on them either.
The thing about the UK though is that we put up with these things; comedians will make
sarcastic remarks about them, columnists will write visceral caustic pieces too and people
will by and large agree, but that's it. It's why we've never had a revolution.
The French on the other hand...
The proliferation of speed cameras in France, while acknowledged generally as a good thing
because they may save lives, is also seen as an invasion of privacy; a sneaky, cowardly at-
tempt at law enforcement, where the police state spies on the ordinary working man through
remote technology, unfair and un-French. As a result, the roadside cameras around us are
constantly having to be replaced following acts of vandalism by people who presumably still
hanker for the old-fashioned gendarme jumping out of a bush at you, telling you to slow
down, lay off the Cognac at lunchtime and that'll be €30,
s'il vous plaît.
And these people, in all probability, are the ones who even now are gathering in the fresh
produce section of the local supermarket muttering darkly about slippery slopes and thin ends
of wedges.
And then it happened. The place shut on a Sunday lunchtime and re-opened on the Monday
morning with a row of three shiny new self-service tills, only no-one went near them. It was
a standoff. Despite being very busy, and only four tills being open, even customers with only
