The tills driving us (to steal) bananas!

ISAW it happen once, on a self-scanning till at my local supermarket. The woman looked harassed, two small children round her feet, and was steadily beeping items into a shopping bag.

It was, I think, a small bunch of bananas that refused to go through. She kept scanning them, the till kept stubbornly ignoring them, and after a moment or two of looking around in vain for a checkout assistant, she quietly popped them into her bag.

I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t even sure if she knew they hadn’t scanned. Perhaps I should have dialled 999 right there on the spot, but it was a bunch of bananas and this was one of the biggest supermarket chains in the country. If there were security systems in place, I thought, perhaps she would be caught at the door (I’ve no idea if she was).

Now it seems, she was far from alone. Apparently a whopping £3.2billion is being pilfered through unmanned checkouts each year, with one in four admitting they have failed to pay for an item. £3.2billion! That seems like an awful lot of bananas.

And while on the surface it would appear we have somehow evolved into a nation of petty thieves (what fun the Artful Dodger would have had with a self-scanner checkout and a super party bag of Haribo), it turns out it’s not quite as simple as that.

Most of those who take items without paying for them at self-scanning tills say they are ‘reluctant thieves’, with more than six in ten blaming technical problems and scanners failing to recognise products (a particular issue, it turns out, when it comes to fruit and veg).

Instead, it all just seems a bit easier to put the item into your shopping bag rather than wait the estimated ice age it takes for a checkout assistant to come along and help. Good old fashioned worrying can also play its part. In a supremely British admission, 67 per cent of shoppers said they were anxious about using self-scanning tills in case they held other people up, and therefore more prone to making mistakes. How… quaint.

The thing is, I like the idea of self-scanning tills, at least in theory. They are a neat way to avoid the 20 questions that so often accompany a trip to a manned checkout – ‘Do you want a bag with that? Do you have a loyalty card? Do you want a receipt? Do you really want that second bottle of chardonnay?’ (this last one may just be my imagination) – allowing you to get your shopping done in solitary, speedy efficiency.

BuT the second something goes wrong – when the dreaded ‘unexpected item in bagging area’ alert goes up (each shop, charmingly, has a different sound) – you know, instantly, you are sunk.

Instead of getting your shopping finished you must watch helpless while a red light flashes above your till, your items lie in your basket un-scanned, and all staff within a two-mile radius disappear into the frozen section.

Surely the answer then, is for more staff on self-scanning tills. Otherwise those supermarkets had better get used to losing an awful lot of bananas.