Three Fingers in The Red Eye of The Retail Robocracy

 

Surprising post in blogging area. Approval needed.

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I need a drink.

There's a Pricelow Express closer than the pub I was aiming for. I'm sure it'll stock the type of drink I like. I'm the kind of person who enjoys intoxicating liquors from the exclusive range known as anything.

 

I'm assaulted by a tacky, instrumental cover of Paul Weller's You Do Something To Me as I walk in to the store. Unless I protest by pushing over rows of shelves to start a lethal domino rally, all I can do is shudder and add this tune to the long list of muzak-tainted songs I can never listen to again.

 

I pick up a bottle of Jura and head for the checkouts, though it seems that the staff have been eaten by computers. People used to be paid to serve customers, but now customers pay to serve themselves. I approach one of the machines, which starts telling me what to do as soon as I touch the word START on its screen. It doesn't like my reply of YES when it asks if I'm using my own bag. "Surprising item in bagging area" is not a sentence, and even as a fragment it's bizarre. I'd be surprised to see a hand-grenade or a dildo in the bagging area of a self-service checkout, but not a bag. I'm annoyed that the machine has described the bag, which I already told it I was going to use, as "surprising", and I'm doubly annoyed by the robot cashier's insistence that my man-bag be no heavier than a flimsy plastic carrier bag. But it is, so the machine assumes I'm stealing something.

 

I stretch my minimal patience for these human-replacing tyrants by calmly lifting surprising item from bagging area and scanning the bottle of whiskey, which I've now opened and drunk from. The machine demands "Approval needed" before I can pay. But, if an impatient customer swigging booze from an unpaid-for bottle can't draw the attention of a human employee, then I don't think that this machine's dim red light is going to.

 

I consider smashing the barcode scanner with the chewing gum rack to see if I can make the self-service machine die slowly, singing "Daisy, Daisy" as it fades. Quieter and more satisfying, though, is to turn and walk out of the inconvenience store with a free bottle of decent whiskey.

 

"Approval needed."

It might be. But it's not getting mine.

 

 

 © Mark Crutchfield