There is a generational divide when it comes to QR codes and I am on the far side of it. But there’s going to be more, many more of them around, according to this paper’s genius business editor, Jonathan Prynn. It’s all about the increase in employers’ National Insurance in the Budget, Rachel Reeves’ way of paying for the Government’s NHS pay rises. That increase will make it more expensive for employers to take on staff, so by the inexorable economic logic of the thing, they’ll be taking on fewer people. If the Chancellor had actually set out to overcome our resistance to AI, robots, automation and digital substitution of labour, she could hardly have done it better. And you know where the cuts in staffing are going to fall especially hard? On those sectors that tend to have lots of people, viz, shops, restaurants and bars. Hence the QR codes.
Talking to a person when you’re buying theatre or cinema tickets is a concept alien to anyone born after the millennium. And they like it that way
Have you noticed that they’re increasingly evident in restaurants? Instead of a waiter giving you a menu or a blackboard with the options of the day, you’re now invited to scan the code and order from your own table without anything so sordid as human contact. Quite often this will be billed as an environmentally friendly measure – in an effort to reduce paper consumption etc. But the truth is that it’s designed to cut out the human middle-man, the waiter. How you react to this will almost certainly depend on your age. Me, I like human contact at every turn. I want to be able to ask the waiter fatuously about the Scotch egg, “is it nice?”, or if it’s possible to get the runny centre set hard instead. A couple of my colleagues actually like the smartphone stuff because it’s quicker and easier. As for talking to a person when you’re buying theatre or cinema tickets, it’s a concept alien to anyone born after the millennium. And they like it that way.
We are drifting courtesy of smartphones and automation into a world where human interaction is avoidable. There is a celebrated novel by JK Huysmans, A Rebours, written in 1885, in which a filthy rich sociophobe, Des Esseintes, manages to organise his life so as to avoid other people. He operates chiefly at night and he orders his servants to work soundlessly around him without him ever having to see them. He certainly doesn’t chat to shop assistants or waiters. The title can be translated as Backwards, or Against the Grain or Against Nature; Huysmans originally thought of calling it Alone.
And that’s the way we’re going, without the aestheticism and the wealth. You can buy things and eat out and get entertainment without ever having to talk to anyone. You can, nowadays, order drinks from the bar via an app; that’s obviously an abomination. It all may cut down on your chances of romance, let alone friendship, but that’s obviously sorted online for many millennials, who would feel threatened by advances from a human being unless it was mediated by a website. There are some heroic supermarkets which are cutting back on automated checkouts – fabulous Booths in the north of England has scrapped them altogether – but for the ones I go to (Waitrose, M&S, Tesco), you’re still channelled towards the machines. Mind you, given that they always go wrong, you don’t entirely avoid human contact; it’s just that the person who can override the technical errors is in demand. Me, the only reason I would go automated is lest my bank card be repudiated, which happens more often than I would like; it is less humiliating when it’s a machine that says Declined.
We need to get a grip. It is the incidental human interactions that make life worth living. It is the chat about the weather (and if you come from Ireland that can take quite some time) at the newsagent/convenience store, which can cheer you up; it is the bit of banter with the man on the poultry stall at the farmers’ market which makes you laugh; it’s the discussion at the meat counter or an actual butcher about how long the beef has been hung which adds to your understanding. That used to be the entire point of a high street; the chance to have a bit of a chat as you go about your business. And I exclude the fake interactions prescribed by corporate formulae. That killer payoff at the end of a tense phone conversation with the bank – “is there anything else I can help you with?” – is all the more annoying when your actual problem hasn’t been sorted. But then, if you have a bank which has a phone number on which you can talk to a person you’re doing really well. ChatGPT is about as good as it gets for most people.
Posters on the Tube that warn against staring as a form of sexual harassment... they make us run scared of looking at each other instead of having a pleasant exchange
Not only would I bar QR codes from restaurants, I should be glad of the chance of even more human interaction. In France and Germany, handshaking among colleagues is far more common than here. I’d love that, even if it were brusque and routine. I should like it if we had the odd pleasant exchange on the Tube with other passengers, and rather fewer of those posters that warn us against staring as a form of sexual harassment; what it actually does is make us run scared of looking at each other. Urban anomie has become normalised and it is diminishing our collective social capital and making us lonelier. Rachel Reeves’ national insurance rise is only one addition to the forces that are making us less sociable, less human; and it’s one more reason to rethink it. Meanwhile, if a restaurant invites you to scan a menu, say you can’t do it. In my case, this would in fact be true.
Melanie McDonagh is a London Standard columnist
