Few things make me sadder for the state of the human race than self-checkout at a grocery store. If someone had told me self-checkout was alive and well in Australia, I may have decided not to move here. I was too busy thinking about schools and neighborhoods to focus on the critical issue of whether or not I will need to weigh my own limes.
To me, patronizing a store and having zero human interaction makes me feel like Tom Hanks befriending a volleyball. Removing humans from certain equations makes sense (driving, anyone?). But when it comes to my food, it feels good to hand over my money to a beating heart, preferably one that is in the body of a smiling human. Thank you for providing me with this food so I can feed my family. Particularly in the age of online shopping, there is a reason I go to a physical location to spend my money. (I’m Miss Cranky-Pants, I’ll be here all week.)
Most days in Perth, I walk to our neighborhood grocery store, Farmer Jacks, to pick up a few things for dinner. Farmer Jacks sells six different brands of agave nectar, and employs real people who are lovely and like to talk about squirrels and roller coasters. But occasionally there are days, like today, when I’m out and about so I swing by Woolworths, a national grocery chain that has decided to trade in customer satisfaction for really cheap milk. “Look at those suckers bagging their own groceries. Who cares that they’re wasting plastic bags and dropping jars of pickles on the floor? We get milk from robot cows and it’s 56 cents a liter, moohaha.”
Standing in line for self-checkout feels like waiting for someone to step on your toe. It’s humiliating and makes no sense. My heart went out to the old lady in the blue coat wrestling with the scanner gun, and I am a chump for not offering to help. But, toddlers should not teach babies how to fly if you know what I’m saying. So I watched this eighty-five-year woman reach down to pull her Weet-Bix out of her basket and try to locate the little scan-able doohickey. It made me sad.
Finally it was my turn. I spent five minutes scrolling through the produce list trying to find the price for red bell peppers before I remembered I’m in Australia and they’re called capsicums. I hope that sweet lady was watching me through the window thinking karma’s a bitch. But of course she wasn’t. She was on her way home to have a bowl of cereal and read about Australia’s new prime minister.
