A couple of years have now passed since
the first self checkout gizmos made their appearance in my favourite
supermarket. Now we have online shopping
as well, which we are told is the future of retail, implying that we had all
better get used to it. Personally, I don’t much like the word ‘retail’. It
smacks of cost effectiveness, which I resent. The handheld gizmos are cost
effective presumably because they make it possible for shops to hire fewer
people to run their checkouts. I like shops staffed by people. Fewer people running checkouts also means more people in my community without
jobs.
Added to this, is the sense of panic and
the feeling of exposure to looking stupid which these gizmos induce. The gizmo seems
to be waiting in its neat little rack for the anxious customer to do all the
wrong things with it and finally have to turn to another human being for
assistance, all of which takes twice as long as it would have done had the
person opted for queuing at the checkout in the first place.
For people who live in the country or
near a small town, as I do, shops supply more than food and the basics of life.
They underpin community. For some, such as the elderly, the housebound or the lone
parent, the visit to the local supermarket will be the only chance they have to
speak to another adult, or even another living soul, all day. The best retail
shops have made it their business to be interested in the human beings who buy
their products. The people who work there get to know their customers. They are
not just being friendly. The result is that the shops feel more like markets
than supermarkets, something which should be encouraged, not only for social
reasons, but also for the environmental knock-on effect of shopping carefully
in one place.
If we plan and only buy what we are going to
need for the next week and try to cook it from scratch (rather than resorting
to ‘instants’) as well as grow it, where possible, the cost along with the environmental
damage caused by the car is reduced proportionately. We do not need to visit a
supermarket every time we run out of something and end up buying (usually on
impulse) three times as much as we should. Only one or two trips to the
supermarket, as opposed to three or four also means less fuel. The same could
be said to be true of online delivery services, but these services come with
their own problems, like having to take food which we have ordered online back
to the shop because it is sub standard or not what we ordered.
All of this is about getting the balance
right between being human and being a consumer. Going to the shops is not just
about shopping. It is, in a deeper sense, about communion. It is the
opportunity to be together with other human beings, to hear their voices and
know companionship, even if we don’t bump into someone we know personally,
which is rare in small towns. These chance meetings, along with the general
sense of being part of the wider community reflect the hospitality of God. They
also invite joy and gratitude in experiencing, be it ever so slightly, his
invitation to us to enjoy the fruits of the earth and benefit from the kind of
technology which brings people together rather than turning them into atomised
consumers.
Without gratitude we become increasingly
isolated from one another and hence from the giver of all good things.
Gratitude is the basis for all human happiness. It is given and received in all
sorts of ways. Most of us experience it in a shared word or two with another
person about the most trivial things, tiny moments of ordinary courtesy while
standing in a queue, remarks about the weather and whatever is currently of
interest to any one community, bits of news, thoughts and concerns about others
or about what is going on in the world. For many people, such moments only
happen in supermarkets. A quick ‘thank you’ to the delivery person does not
quite do it. Neither does the cost effective self checkout gizmo, for all its
promise of speed and efficiency.
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