Strange but true: many shoppers actually prefer self-checkout (and other weird reports from south London's retail frontline)

 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-social 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 opposite 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? 

 

So which supermarket is really the best value? All of them, isn't it obvious?

Happy to add to the gale of derision which met the Which? survey finding that Sainsbury's is the UK's cheapest supermarket.

Anyone who belongs to that spectral army of austerity-stricken citizens hanging on in there on scraps of income from McJobs, freelance gig economy zero-fun contracts, swindler-sold private pension schemes, shrivelled benefits etc, knows that dear old J Sainsbury is far from the best value place to do your shop.

We have to shop around.

At least in the cramped suburbs of London the less-well-off can easily visit all the big name supermarkets in a short time to compare prices.

I am part of an anonymous circle of bargain-hunters who trace ceaseless circuits from Aldi to Asda to Tesco to Morrisons (Camberwell branch, as you ask) to Iceland and of course to Sainsburys and even on occasion, just for a laugh, to Waitrose.

Laugh? You have to, unless you'd rather cry. You heard, supermarkets are one of the few places an alarming proportion of the UK's population get any form of social interaction. It's usually just "How are you today?" "Fine thanks. And you?" And that can be enough.

Please don't ask us to do our comparisons online. The best thing about in-real-life shopping is the realisation that store managers are still human, and therefore unpredictable. Well, some of them.

Of course we nearly always end up buying most of the regular stuff at Lidl, which remains the cheapest, and surprisingly often the best quality (if you don't believe me, compare their fresh garlic with the miserable little things at Tesco, etc).

There's an obvious rule: avoid the "local" branches of all these places if at all possible. If you have time, it is possible.

But - look again. The Which? survey was based (mysteriously so far as I am concerned) on a basket of branded goods.

Madness. Why buy Mr Kipling cakes, when they're over twice the price of the German supermarket rip-off?

Well, I couldn't be bothered anyway, as I  subsist on cheap red wine,  nuts, spinach, oatcakes, bananas,  olive oil, garlic and the cheapest French, Spanish and Italian cheeses anywhere in the EU (may god preserve it). Mostly from Lidl, Aldi and Asda.

(Aldi, however, entails a sortie further south, until recently al the way to Tooting Broadway. Now there's a new one two stops closer, on Balham High Road, occupying the space vacated last year by Poundland).

For some reason I am always cheered by the high visibility of The Morning
 Star when you walk into Sainsbury's Clapham branch. Shop on, comrades!

Perversely, I do still go to Sainsburys on Clapham High Street quite a lot. This branch has a good feel to it. The first thing I usually see there is the Morning Star, displayed prominently on the newspaper rack: I love this fact.

In truth, Sainsbury's is not cheap, their discounts are rather mean, but they do regular 25 per cent off six bottles o' wine deals.  And if you take full advantage of Nectar cards and the occasional promotions, you can walk away feeling un-ripped-off. And their own brand sardines in olive oil are great.

Most of us cheapskate shoppers could use supermarket pricing policies as our special subject on Mastermind. I know the different approaches of Sainsbury, Tesco and other branch managers to cutting prices of fresh produce near closing time - though, mercifully, this practice is diminishing as more of the big stores donate their short-life stock to local food banks.

So, on we go, the hunter-gatherers of the SW postcodes swarm around that golden parallelogram.
At its western extremity, the shining duo of Asda and Lidl at Clapham Junction.

Ah, Asda. Now that it's owned by US retail monster, WalMart, perhaps we should avoid it. But this branch offers such a fine range of interesting food and drink, at good prices.  The staff are sweet as sweet, amazingly given the dastardly tricks of their employers.

But why does this store go to such lengths to deter cyclists?  It was built in the 80s, when the car was still king. It has a two-level car park (currently being re-surfaced). There is no way of penetrating it by bike without dismounting, carrying your bike down the steps from Lavender Hill entrances or up the travelator from the car park.

Retail fortress? Asda at Clapham Junction: a good value store once you get
inside - but what an uninviting prospect for anyone NOT arriving by car.

Their tiny bike-rack area does offer the compensation of fitted carpets. Does that swing it for you?

No. So more and more often we visit the nearby Lidl instead.

At the north eastern extremity - a 15 minute spin or 87/77 busride over Lavender Hill and Wandsworth Road - is the big Sainsburys at Nine elms.

This used to be a delightful meeting place: shoppers flocked here from Battersea, Stockwell, Oval, Clapham and beyond. But now it has been re-developed, engulfed by the ugly apartment blocks of the new Nine Elms, the shop itself raised to a first-floor, stuffy trading hall.

The strange magic of that 1980s shop has gone. It is now thoroughly unpleasant, unless, I suppose, you arrive by car - but who designs inner-London supermarkets to meet the needs of motorists in 2020? Answer: Sainsburys. It has a car park on the ground floor, just as bad as the Lavender Hill Asda (but that one has the excuse that it was built in the 80s).

So. We migrate south, to the Tesco on Acre Lane and the conveniently close Lidl; or the smarter, bigger Lidl near Stockwell tube station. I used also to go to Tesco on Kennington Lane, near Vauxhall: a lovely bread counter. For a long while I avoided the Tesco at Clapham South, as it is housed in the old women's hospital, which closed only after long public protests.

Now - shame on me - I can be found there, on occasion, popping two bottles of Tesco Sangiovese into my rucksack, two for £9. It's good Italian wine.

The new Nine Elms: even uglier than expected

Let's hope that when the new Wandsworth Road tube station is built in the the foreground of this pic it will block out the view of that ugly bunch of apartment buildings behind. 

Some of that cluster of hefty buildings around the old Sainsbury's site at the eastern end of the Battersea-Nine Elms-Vauxhall development are nearing completion - and God help us, what a terrible blot on the landscape they are.

Take one look at these pictures, that's all you will be able to stand. The shapes and colours are just so dull, the positioning of each building in relation to its neighbours seems wrong. Imagine the poor buggers who are spending their life savings on an apartment on the 9th floor of one of these dingy erections (OK - no normal people have such life savings, only City rooks and crooks and speculators and you won't feel sorry for them).

You couldn't even call them towers; they are neither high-rise nor low rise. They are hunched, bad tempered, and they lean awkwardly towards each other, like a badly-posed group photo of people who loathe each other.

It has to be said they are wilfully ugly. In an age when computers allow architects to design buildings of almost any shape, and materials can be supplied in almost every colour, how on earth did they think these shapes and colours would do for this location? The facings are dark grey, tan, off-white and a sickly yellow. The tan is particularly horrible - the colour of the last shoes on the rack in a Clark's sale when everything else has gone.

One  thing is clear - there's not going to be any shortage of contenders for the 2017 Carbuncle of the Year awards, many with an SW8 post code.

Which is a shame, because I have been longing to be proved wrong on this development. It surely will all be wonderful when finished.

A singularly depressing bunch of buildings hits your eyeballs
as you head west down the Wandsworth Road and see this
new Barratt Homes development nextto the new Sainsburys.

The new Sainsburys has been open for a while. I went there, as I used to quite like the "old" 1980s Sainsburys at Nine Elms that attracted customers from an astonishingly wide hinterland, south east down to Camberwell, locals in Vauxhall and Stockwell, and most of Clapham, Battersea and beyond before "local" supermarkets popped up every few yards.

The new one - oh, I am sorry to have to say this - is underwhelming. For a start , it is all up two steep flights of stairs. When you enter that shiny gold and orange building, you walk into a bland car-park foyer with those annoyingly slow travelators going up and down. Who, in 2017, builds a supermarket designed chiefly with motorists in mind in such a central location?

The shop itself occupies the normal large space, which could just as well be used for offices, storage, a call centre...a mass dormitory....a rave venue; and who knows, if it last long enough it might see  all these uses.

It shares the floor with a couple of not convincing concessions. One is called Habitat but  it's hard to see much connection with the original yuppies' favourite furniture store in their offerings; not much sign of the Conran dedication to good, useful design is visible.

What a shame. No-one expects to love a supermarket, but there was a time when people admitted to some affection for the old Sainsburys, where you would keep bumping into people you knew. These days the store seems to be just an adjunct to the property developers; indeed, with all its inner city Local stores, it seems Sainsburys is a bit of a player int this field itself.