There is an interesting debate being played out in the media today following an incident at Sainsbury’s where a checkout worker had refused to serve a customer until she had stopped talking on her mobile phone. Apparently the supermarket are simultaneously apologising to the customer while supporting their member of staff.
So who was right? Was the customer rude and disrespectful or was the checkout worker impudent or expecting too much? Perhaps it was the fault of the technology that means everyone has some sort of device stuck to their ears at all times these days? Sainsbury’s was in an impossible situation, the customer is always right but this highlights an interesting change in the relationships between provider and customer.
But is the real issue one of a drive to depersonalise the whole shopping experience, a movement which the major supermarket chains have been at the vanguard? It seems that with each trip to pick up your weekly groceries there is some new way to make it easier to transact without interacting with people. A few years ago the self-serve tills were a novelty with one or two attended by a desultory and often frustrated store employee. Now there are banks of them and they have become so popular that there are signs up requesting shoppers to limit their purchases to no more than fifteen items to give everyone else a chance.
Customers can enter a store, through the automated doors of course, select their requirements, check the bar codes for pricing information, weigh the loose produce, take up offers using QR codes, pay their money and leave the store without any human contact. Indeed the only person they are likely to bump into is one of the scurrying pickers employed by the supermarket to shop for home delivery. Soon the delivery will be replaced by a machine and then this too will have lost the human touch.
Is it any wonder then that as the stores are screaming ‘don’t interact with the employees’ that the customer can feel it is acceptable to ignore the attentions of the checkout worker? It’s a bit like don’t feed the animals. The whole experience has been depersonalised so much that it is easy, if not acceptable to forget that they are indeed human and are sitting there craving the contact that enhances their job satisfaction.
We are all used to the self-serve tills and the hand baskets only queue now. So perhaps we will soon see the introduction of ‘No contact’ and ‘Friendly Chat’ lines at the tills. Then we’ll all be able to make the choice.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 