I’ve wailed before about the proliferation of self-checkout machines. But I will do so again, because my mood darkens every time I visit my local big supermarket. I first honoured the place with my business about 20 years ago. Back then there were about two dozen staffed checkouts, in those days of innocence before the death march of progress gathered pace. A handful of self-checkouts appeared; a handful of human ones vanished. At first we saw them as harmless novelties. They were never all in operation, and those that were rarely worked properly. The whole caper seemed to involve as many staff supervising machines as could have been operating a battery of proper tills. But we indulged the management, bless them. They’ve got to try these things, haven’t they?
Then came more of them, and ever fewer human tills. A zero-sum game. It remained the case that some machines were out of action and the remainder invariably had a glitch in store for you. Only the other day I had a torrid time with some pitiful, dried-out geraniums on a three-for-£5 offer. They just wouldn’t scan. I got them for nothing in the end, but they all died anyway.
The next wave in the deluge saw automated tills take up more space than human ones. Tipping point. Extinction loomed. And it looms ever closer. The inevitable is happening. Still more territory has now been swallowed up by a dozen new, bigger auto-tills – the ones with enough space for a trolley rather than just a basket. That’s useful, I suppose. But what is this fresh hell? A barrier to exit this new area? Oh yes, my friends, now you have to swipe a barcode on your receipt to be released. So cruel. I imagined someone like my dad congratulating himself on negotiating the machine, but then pushing feebly at the barrier, unable to leave. “You need a code!” someone will shout. “A code?” he’ll echo in wonder. He’ll be there a while.
I asked the poor woman working there what, in the name of all that is good and holy, they were playing at. “It’s terrible,” she whispered, shrugging in despair. “Old people, disabled people …” Her voice trailed off as someone shouted that something wasn’t scanning, and off she went.
In the distance, tucked away at the far end next to the freezers, the three remaining checkout people beavered away, as if for old time’s sake. Soon there will surely be just one human-operated till. You’ll probably have to book in advance to use it. And then, one dark day, the game will be up. There will be none. They will only exist in science museums as working exhibits, operated by actors, for our grandchildren to point at and giggle.
The whole picture verges on the dystopian. It put me in mind of something I couldn’t put my finger on but, as I shambled out past the tobacco counter, it came to me. What are those roller shutters there for, by the way? Are they to save our tender eyes the very sight of evil cigs, or are they to protect the stock from a ram raid by a crazed trolley-pusher? Anyway, yes, it came to me: the opening lines of The End of the Trail by Garrison Keillor: The last cigarette smokers in America were located in a box canyon south of Donner Pass in the High Sierra by two federal tobacco agents in a helicopter who spotted the little smoke puffs just before noon.
Yes, it’ll be like this. Human checkout enthusiasts will not be seen as harmlessly eccentric nostalgics. No, we’ll be outlawed by the AI police as degenerate counter-revolutionaries. We’ll scuttle off to long-abandoned workshops in railway arches and play pretend shops buying pretend goods from real humans. They’ll never take us alive.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
