SELF SERVICE TILLS: YOUR FURY

It’s REALLY struck a nerve – the Mail’s crusade against those maddening automated checkouts. Now readers vent their frustration – store bosses take note!

EArlIer t his month, Jenni Murray wrote in the Mail of her l oathing f or the self- service checkout machines taking over our supermarkets. Britain now has 42,000 of the things, yet her tests proved that they’re much less efficient and far more stressful than the traditional manned till.

Then, on saturday, Tom rawstorne reported on another automated ir r i t ant driving Britain to distraction: the computerised banking machine.

They both struck a nerve. Our mailbag overflowed with tales of frustration and annoyance, proving that the automatic till and bank teller really are some of Britain’s most hated modern phenomena. Here are some of your stories of frustration with those dreaded robotic supermarket tills . . .

I FOUND MYSELF YELLING AT A SILLY MACHINE

I used to be a hospital ward sister and still can’t bear things that don’t run smoothly or lack common sense. And the self- service checkout area strikes me as so inefficient, so frustrating, it typifies the ways in which big supermarkets are getting customer service wrong.

I use a Morrisons with eight or nine of the machines. But lots of things just won’t go through the scanner — my local newspaper, for example — or require someone to authorise them before they do.

Items that are too light — a couple of chillies, say — aren’t recognised in the bagging area and the whole process grinds to a halt.

You put money in, but it doesn’t register and says you haven’t paid, so everything stops. Again.

I’m not sure I’ve ever used one and not had to ask for help, which seems to defeat the point. Worse, everyone gets a bit snappy with each other.

I used to know the woman on the checkout and every time I did my shopping, at exactly the same time on a Friday evening, we’d have a friendly chat as she was scanning and I was bagging. I knew all about her daughters and her cat and she knew about me.

It’s so much better for us to have a bit of human contact like that.

Nowadays, we all stand there getting barked at by a machine. On more than one occasion I’ve found myself barking back at it in my head, only to realise that I’m speaking out loud. This is how they get you. YVONNE CHALLANS, 64,

Sheffield

THEY MADE ME SO MAD, I TIPPED MY TROLLEY OVER

AT MY local Asda, with a weekly shop in my trolley, I got to the checkouts to find none was manned, and the supervisor directed me to the ugly self-service machines.

I don’t like using them at all. That day, I had a lot of shopping and it was going to take ages to scan it all myself. Had I known that there were no cashiers available, I wouldn’t have entered the store in the first place.

so instead I told the supervisor, very politely but through gritted teeth, that I was going to abandon my trolley there in the middle of Asda and go to another supermarket where I could be served by a human being.

‘Could I please have my £1 coin back from the trolley?’ I asked, since I could hardly shove the thing back into its stack when it was full of food.

But no. He wouldn’t give me the £1 from a till and he wouldn’t get the tool they use to retrieve coins stuck in trolleys.

so I saw red and did a very petty thing. I took the trolley with both hands and tipped it over so all the food tumbled out on to the floor.

Of course, the eggs broke all over the place. In fact, I did my best to break them on purpose, which, yes, I admit is also very childish and silly. But it did feel good.

The supervisor shrugged and turned away — as though he saw i rate customers making a mess of his supermarket every day. Most of the other customers laughed, and it’s possible a few clapped.

Then I took the empty trolley to the stack and got my pound back. And I still refuse to use those wretched selfservice machines. WENDY TAYLOR, 62,

Lancing, Sussex

I PUT IN MY MONEY — AND IT DISAPPEARED

PerHAPs I’m unlucky, or perhaps they’re not well maintained at my local supermarket — but twice now I have put money into a self-scan checkout and it’s failed to recognise it.

THe first time, the shop assistant was perfectly decent about it, and despite having to wait for a person with a key to unlock the machine, no one questioned the fact that I’d paid. But the second time, the assistant was very patronising and suspicious and I was made to feel extremely awkward in f ront of l ots of other shoppers.

I’ve been going to this particular Tesco store for more than 20 years, and it was ridiculous that I should feel so uncomfortable. Of course, once the till was opened, the assistant found my £10 note stuck within its bowels. But I was given no apology. It’s enormously frustrating, and wouldn’t happen on a manned checkout. CAROL ROSENBERG-FOX, 64,

Stevenage, Herts

I’M IN A WHEELCHAIR — THEY STOP ME SHOPPING

severAl months ago, my small local Asda replaced all the manned checkouts with self- service points, so the only person on a till was on the tobacco and lottery ticket counter.

This was a nightmare for me. I have Ms and am in a wheelchair, and find it al most i mpossible t o use t he automated tills.

I find it hard to juggle everything on my lap — purse, handbag, unwieldy basket, various cards — and very difficult indeed to scan and move the shopping fast enough.

The first time I tried to do it, the assistant was busy and I sat there, holding everyone else up, waiting for her to help. I find these machines very upsetting because effectively they stop me from going shopping.

LINDA RIORDAN, 60, Pontefract, West Yorkshire

WHEN THE COMPUTER SHOUTS AT ME, I FREEZE

All my local supermarkets are very busy. It always feels like you’re fighting your way through a crowd.

And at the end of it are self-service tills. I have always f ound them intimidating and baffling.

I am 65; I am not incapable of working them out, yet somehow my brain seems to scramble when faced with them. I am left-handed, and the place for the basket is not where my brain thinks it should be.

Often I get it t he wrong way around. Then, when the machine shouts at me, I freeze until an assistant arrives.

All the time there is a queue of people behind me watching my distress. Far

better for our blood pressure that we gather our thoughts as we lay everything out on a conveyor belt; that we are given time to find our loyalty card and get our bags ready. ELAINE BENNETT, 65, Romford, Essex

I WAS SO FED UP WITH ASDA, I CHANGED SHOPS

RetaileRs claim that self-scan checkouts aren’t costing jobs, but at my local asda, staff hours have been reduced because of them. i work at the cattle market in ashford, Kent, and do my shopping just after six in the morning.

But since asda installed self-service tills, they’ve closed the manned checkouts before 8am and after 6pm. so now i do my big shop elsewhere. and since i also buy provisions for staff at the market — £300 a week in tea, coffee and snacks — asda has lost that custom, too. PAUL TAYLOR, 67,

Ashford, Kent

THEY BRING THE WORST OUT IN MY PARKINSON’S

i have Parkinson’s disease and loathe automated tills. they are demoralising and make me feel stupid. Parkinson’s affects everyone who has it in different ways, but very often the tremor gets worse if you feel stressed or upset. i think everyone agrees that it’s possible to get agitated while using a self-service till — and when that happens, i shake more.

it’s a vicious circle — the more i shake, the less able i am to scan the items and get them into the bag quickly enough. and the slower i go, the more i feel that people are staring at me and perhaps not understanding why i am shaking. the process becomes nightmarish.

i only ever use them when i’m absolutely forced to. i would rather queue halfway around the shop for a manned checkout. LIN MERCHANT, 64,

Telford, Shropshire

THE ELDERLY NEED STAFF, NOT MACHINES

Most of the big supermarket companies don’t seem to appreciate their staff are their biggest asset.

i am old enough to remember when shopping was a social affair, but now it is a dreadful rush to get things in a trolley, scan them through a bewildering machine, and then get out of the shop again as quickly as possible. My 84-year-old wife Ruth is quite severely disabled. a while ago, we went to the large Marks & spencer at West Quay in southampton, but could find no shop assistant to help her. i wrote to the company, and several weeks later, on a return visit, found the situation much improved.

Perhaps they are beginning to grasp that for many of us service i s more i mportant even than price. We gave up going to tesco several years ago, even though it was our local store.

We could never find what we wanted, there were fewer and fewer assistants to help and we never found out how to cope with the automatic tills. KENNETH PETERS, 93,

Southampton

MY CHANGE CAME IN A CASCADE OF 1p COINS

at Wh smith, the scale on the automated checkout did not recognise the birthday card i had put on it.

it was clearly too light, which is an obvious flaw in the system.

i called an assistant who was lurking elsewhere and after she did something to the till, i put my money in. i was expecting £2.20 in change, and two £1 coins appeared.

But then, after a very long pause, 20 1p coins clattered into the little dish, as though i’d won the jackpot on a slot machine. obviously i felt like an idiot, but

i scooped it all up and insisted that the assistant change it for a single coin. she seemed very surprised that i was asking.

i’d rather not use the machines again, but at Wh smith, there’s often no choice. EVELYN ZIVKOVIC, 75,

Maidenhead, Berks

I TELL STAFF: I’M DOING YOU OUT OF A JOB!

Jenni MuRRay’s excellent piece on self- service checkouts really struck a chord.

i’ve made it a mission to educate shop staff about the threat to their livelihoods posed by the infernal self-scan machine.

i try to tell them that by doing their job for them, i will eventually put them out of one. Most just shrug and grin — but of course the ultimate purpose of these automated tills i s not to i mprove convenience or service, but save money by getting rid of costly staff.

as a f ormer producer of tv commercials, i’ve frequently sat in the board rooms of the largest high street companies, and perhaps understand better than most what their top priorities are. it is not very often customer satisfaction.

Many of the larger stores now have helpful assistants whose job it is to funnel you out of traditional checkout lines and towards the self-scan tills.

But in effect these workers are handing their colleagues their P45s, s i nce t he more a ut o mated transactions that occur, the more evidence executives have that selfservice ‘works’, and that customers actually ‘prefer’ it.

if only the shop assistants would grasp this simple truth, perhaps they’d stop smirking at my genuine attempts to preserve their jobs. ROGER HOPKINS, 69,

Bournemouth