Luddites Unite

 "Them robots innit, coming over here taking our jobs", I think now, whenever I go into a supermarket and see the self-checkouts they are putting in everywhere - although when I very first saw them, when living in London, I thought their cry of "Unexpected item in the bagging area" might one day be appropriated for the title of a chick lit novel about a girl who gets pregnant by mistake. 

So far I think nobody else has thought that and acted upon it. Or, more likely, many others have, but they have recognised that it is a very stupid idea. 

In Hungary, I don't think the supermarket robots speak anyway, those that are here, that is - thus far, Hungarian self-checkout machines are relatively few and far between, I'm glad to say. 

As far as I know, they exist mainly in one of the two chains of supermarkets with yellow and blue signs - Aldi or Lidl, (I've chosen not to waste my limited mental capacity distinguishing between the two). Incidentally, in whichever of those two supermarkets it is where they haven't invested heavily in robots, all "store announcements" are made first in Hungarian and then again in the pre-recorded voice of an Australian woman, which I find appealing. Any other Australians in Hungary may be interested, if they are feeling mildly homesick.

In short, I recognise the convenience of self-checkouts (although an alternative would be employing far more people so that all checkout desks are filled) and therefore I do use them, but I rather wish I wasn't given the opportunity to make this anti-social choice. Taking away jobs is bad enough, but taking away the minor interchanges of daily life is worse. 

A way to defeat the new wave of supermarket robots did occur to me yesterday when I saw one elderly woman use a self-checkout so farcically incompetently that she needed a member of the shop's staff to scan every single one of her bits of shopping. Watching her, I realised that, if all customers had the courage and intent, we could together perform equal incompetence, so that more and more staff members would be needed to help us. Eventually managers everywhere would be forced to recognise that it would actually be a much better idea to employ people. 

I won't bet on that though, because as this small item shows, the business of replacing humans with non-humans has been with us for a very long time.