You think you’re quite a hard, cynical capital city-type person and then something happens to make you realise that you’re actually softer than an Andrex puppy sitting atop a mountain of quadruple velvet toilet rolls. On Tuesday I nipped into my Sainsbury’s Local by the station to grab the essential item I always go into a shop to buy, yet usually come out with everything but, namely the aforementioned toilet roll, and discovered that all the tills except three had gone. In their place are those self-service checkouts with the cold, disembodied robotic voice (definitely no cute Wall E inspiration there) that’s deceptively soothing, as it belies the less discernible patronising and sinister tone with which it directs shoppers on how to scan their goods correctly. It’s alarmingly reminiscent of Nurse Ratched's voice from the 1970s film One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.
Not surprisingly, a shiver went down my spine. And then a feeling of sadness swamped me and my purchases-to-be. Even Uncle Ben’s eternally cheery face staring at me from the jar of Hickory Smoke Barbecue sauce in my basket, suddenly looked gloomy. If those 7 tills had been replaced by a robotic voice, what had happened to the 7 humans? Those helpful souls with warm smiles and a friendly, "Hi, how are you today?" the sincerity of which never fails to jolt you out of your comfortable detachment. They force you into a smile before you can stop yourself, and by the end of the transaction you’re divulging all sorts of secrets that usually us city-types protectively keep to our clique of friends, for fear of a personal space invasion. You know, top-secret stuff like how our day’s been or what we’re doing that evening. Mad really.
I began to worry about the Jamaican lady with the long painted fingernails, Vincent, the diligent Indonesian chap, who always reminds you of the current offers, “You know this is buy one get one free, don’t you?” and lets you run back down the aisles, Supermarket Sweep-style to pick up the free tin of soup before returning red-faced and out of breath to the till. Did they all lose their jobs to Nurse Ratched’s voice? How would Joyce keep up those fantastic nails? Don’t they know that acrylics aren’t cheap?
Worse still, what about my favourite cashier, Hassan? The sweet old man who’s like your granddad, who packs my bags without hesitation and even lets me off the odd 10p here and there if I don’t have it, with an unmistakeable twinkle in his eye at my polite protestations as he adds that it’ll be ok as long as I bring the money with me the next time, knowing that I never will. I remember blushing like a teenager when I had to ask him for condoms, and shamefully bottled out at the last minute with a request for some Rennies from behind the counter instead. He was the nearest you can get these days to the old-fashioned local shopkeeper, who saw his customers regularly and built up a relationship with them, knowing not only his, but his customer’s onions too. A community figure who people would visit (under the guise of buying toilet roll) to have a gossip or a debate about the front-page story of the newspaper, not just to make a cold transaction.
As these shopkeepers and their local independent shops have almost been completely wiped out by the Supermarket, Pound Shop and Cost-Cutter franchises, us city dwellers at least have become incapable of developing more than a ‘hi and bye’ relationship with our cashiers. But now it seems that even this is being taken away from us. The human contact with people from different walks of life, which drags us out of the trap of our protective bubbles, which are actually the cause of our paranoia and fear. Mental really, aren’t we? Yes after the mysterious disappearance of the cashiers, Nurse Ratched’s voice has taken over the asylum, and now there’s only one way out. Find the nearest Red Indian called Chief and get him to lob a drinking fountain threw the window of your local Sainsbury’s or Tesco, then run like the wind and escape to a hippy commune where they grow their own food.
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