Asda, Clapham Junction, on a busy Sunday afternoon, last week or any other time of year.
There's a huge queue of mainly young people - the type who used to be called yuppies but who might now be called gen Z-ers or whatever - waiting to use the self-check out tills.
Most wearing sports kit of some sort or other, some clutching multi-packs of beer, energy drinks and crisps. Maybe hoping to get them home before some big match kicks off on tv.
Clutching my own haul of bananas, pitta bread, and a kilo of Lancashire Farm yogurt, I am surprised and happy to find much shorter queues at the two or three remaining real check-outs, with a human being at the till. The further you walk from the exit, the shorter the queue. I am through in three minutes, and have a brief chat with the check-out person into the bargain.
If you think this was a freak inversion of normal experience, think again. Over the past year I've benefitted from this phenomenon dozens of times. Not just in Asda, but all the supermarkets I ever use, even the Germans.
Sainsburys on Clapham High Street is, at certain times of day, a reliable example. This medium-size supermarket is where two separate SW4 demographics meet but never coalesce. Well-off, youngish professionals rub shoulders with mainly less well-off residents of nearby social housing estates.
In the former group, the young men _– sports shorts and sporting that uniquely unattractive hairstyle of the moment – were joining an already massive queue for the self-checkout tills.
Perhaps they don't even realise that there are two or three human check-out tills at the back of the store. Here are much shorter queues, often old people (like me) who have an instinctive dislike of machines that tell you off. Also people who for whatever reason don't have debit or credit cards let alone mobile phone payment apps.
Not saying these yuppie types are bad or unpleasant people - simply that their upbringing and London lifestyles seems to turn them against engaging with "others" (ie not their sort) in the flesh. Maybe some are scarred by Covid (but these are surely the ones who rarely even go out to shop, but stay home and have everything, even a single bottle of Heinz Tomato ketchup, delivered to their door).
This is perhaps a trivial example of a deeper, longer-term change in behaviour. Reluctance to even think of wasting time, and assuming that anything involving touch-screen technology is bound to be quicker and more efficient than the old ways. The terrible risk of becoming engaged in small talk with some grubby old man in the queue (that's me, obviosuly). Getting stuck behind the mum with a clutch of lively kids, who's having problems with her Nectar vouchers; being silently judged by others for your purchase of a twelve-pack of lager and those tubes of crisps (that's just my prejudice talking).
Or maybe it's just herd instinct - seeing a long queue of your type of people, and joining it.
Long may this phenomenon persist as it means other shoppers can enjoy a bit of human interaction and get throuhg more quickly.
But self-checkout continues to expand, with many smaller branches rarely having any staffed tills. The retailers prefer machines to people; they are so much cheaper.
Another trend seems to subliminally encourage people to buy more. Two or three of the shops I used to use have now got rid of nearly all the small baskets in favour of enlarged, deformed plastic baskets with wheels and handles.
These new contraptions block aisles and other shoppers trip over them. They're just as annoying as the flotillas of wheeled suitcases that trundle across the departure zones of all big railway stations, airports, etc.
But they're there, and everyone except me and a few other stubborn users of old-school baskets, have accepted them.
Reminder to self: you are just a relic of a bye-gone age. Don't worry about these things!
Context: First versions of this post were written soon after the covid lockdowns, when shoppers were still re-learning the rules of social interaction. Like the majority of stuff written for this blog, I didn't publish, thinking it too trivial and subjective, too much reeking of prejudice.
Ironically, the day I chose to put it out into the open air, large numbers of kids were dropping into supermarkets on Clapham High Street and avoiding all the check-outs, whether self or staffed. These end of term disturbances on Saturday and Tuesday seemed to me like a bigger version of what happens on that stretch of the high street every school day at abut 4pm, when bunches of demob-happy kids crowd around bus-stops and the fast-food outlets. Similar surges have been seen all over London over recent years.
The location - one of the most dismal High Streets in London – sees diferent but equally disturbing displays of anti-scoial behaviour every Friday and Saturday evening, when the ya-hoo stag and hen night crowds descend. It's like a laboratory experiment for sociologists. That big shiny new M & S oppostie Sainsburys is emblematic of the Clapham disease. The shop is for well-heeled young professionals with lots of cash but not much time. I wonder if that space had been taken over by Lidl instead of M & S, would we have seen such enthusiastic crowds of non-paying customers on Tuesday evening?
