The Press and Journal (Inverness, Highlands, and Islands)
Blondes have more fun – but not as much as the self-service checkout watchers
If you need a good laugh, just go to a supermarket at a busy time. Friday teatimes or Saturday lunchtimes, for example. Go in but don’t stray too far from the door. Then just hang around, looking all unconcerned and nonsuspicious until you spot a target. Keep your beady eyes on the area around the self-service checkout. You are looking for someone over 60 – no maybe 50 – who is just about to use it for the first time.
They have heard that they are faster than the usual checkouts. They have not dared to use them until now. They are in a hurry. Then they go for it.
Scanning each item and making sure the barcode is facing a wee window is the first problem.
When they are in a hurry and they are flustered in case anyone is watching them, they can miss the barcodes and have to keep rotating the cornflakes endlessly until the beep finally comes.
Everything has a barcode – except the bags of veg. So on go the glasses to select Vegetables and then Carrots on the screen.
Everything must prompt a beep. Was that a beep or was that from the check-out next to them? It wasn’t.
Many people get confused and say they have a blonde moment when they use these machines.
That is so not fair on anyone with fair hair because I have seen brunettes and silver foxes of all kinds looking glaikit and trying to summon assistance because they have messed up at these checkouts.
They think it’s beeped but it hasn’t and the robots can detect the weight of something that wasn’t scanned and let you know. That’s when the technology kicks in.
It used to say “Unexpected item in the bagging area”. No explanation of what or where that is.
Which is why that phrase was voted one of the most annoying things ever by shoppers in 2015 so it has been ditched by most supermarkets. Now it just tends to say “Please wait for assistance”. Oh yeah, much better.
However, they still haven’t fixed the confusion when you try to pay by card.
How many times have I tried to push my blue contactless wonder into the orifice that gives the change?
There should be a flashing light around the correct slot. Or maybe they should use the booming electronic voice to harken back to The Golden Shot – a TV show in the 1970s hosted by Bob Monkhouse they keep threatening to bringback. If they did that, the machine could say “Up a bit, left a bit, right a bit.”
Then, with a loud fanfare and sparkly confetti falling from the ceiling, the guy who does the voiceover on X Factor could come over the speakers and announce: “Yeeeees. You have found it. Insert your card nooooow”.
Robotic checkouts are not getting better. They remind me of Liz Macdonald, another blonde bombshell – the one in Coronation Street.
I have also not watched that soap much in the past decade because, well, I have a life.
Actually, it used to be good and it was not difficult to appreciate how anyone could get caught up in the plotlines.
I know there have been some murderous characters. But since dodgy financial adviser Richard Hillman drove his people carrier into Weatherfield Canal to try to get rid of Gail Platt and her pesky kids, nothing could top that.
Never really liked financial advisers since, either. I don’t care if it is acting. Watch them. That’s all I am saying.
However, I happened to see the omnibus edition last weekend and guess what? Nothing has changed in Corrie in 10 whole years.
Steve married Tracy – and had a fight. His parents, Jim and the dumb blonde Liz Macdonald, got together again – and had a fight.
We have been watching the same scraps with the same people for 20 flipping years. Stop it, you lot. Sort your lives out. Oh yeah, and sack the writers.
I am going off these unstaffed robots. There is nothing quick about these beeping machines. They are just for miserable people who are too miserable to even talk to anyone at the checkout.
Everyone else just uses these machines when there are hordes of people and the queues are too long at the conventional non-beeping checkouts which are staffed by warm-blooded human beings who must face the daily challenges of tax demands, annoying relatives and flatulence – unlike the beeping robots near the door.
Yeah, blondes have had to put up with a lot. Friends of Dolly Parton always used to rush to her defence.
In the 1980s there was a trend for always taking the mickey out of blondes. Everyone did it.
If you were fair-haired, female, fashionable and fabulous you were assumed not to be blessed with grey matter.
Dolly Parton, however, insisted she was never offended by all the dumb-blonde jokes lobbed in her direction.
She said: “Why should I be offended? I know I’m not dumb. And I also know that I’m not blonde.”
In 2015, shoppers voted that phrase one of the most annoying things ever, so it has been ditched by most