On the way home from work tonight (after a particularly hard day that started at 6am), I dropped into Tesco to pick up a lazy person’s meal – a pizza and a four-pack of Guinness. I intentionally queued at the very long queue in front of the human checkout rather than the very short queue in front of the machine checkout because :-
- I wanted the goods bagged for me.
- I didn’t want to wait (and queue jump) whilst the checkout people got around to authorising my alcohol purchase.
I noticed several curious things whilst queuing … which was rapidly getting longer :-
- The checkout people included the slowest checkout person this Tesco has (not her fault I’m sure but it has relevance later), and someone who is not normally found working the checkout.
- Shortly after I joined the queue, the one who is not normally working the till started suggesting that people use the machine checkout. In fact she was quite insistent about it.
- She then shut her till and left the counter to go up and down the queue suggesting people use the machine checkout and offering to show people how to use it.
- She then decided to spend a few minutes moving shopping baskets around whilst the slowest checkout person was left alone servicing a very long queue.
- Showing people how to use the machine checkout actually took longer than it would have done to just do the checkout normally.
When I finally reached the head of the queue, it was obvious that there were no plastic bags to bag the shopping for anyone … except for those who had chosen to use the machine checkout. Which was decided odd as it is more common for those with full baskets to use the human checkout.
I can understand that plastic bags should be discouraged, but this was a little extreme! In fact the bloke in front of me was forced to buy a re-usable bag because he had far more shopping than could be carried by hand. I would have just left it and gone elsewhere in his case!
It did seem as though this particular Tesco seems to regard customers as an inconvenience.