February 2011
I really do like gadgets.
Yes, I am a gadgeteer, a gadge-fanatic or, as most people know me, a gadget-bore. I can’t remember when my interest started although I do remember getting one of the world’s first digital watches which must have been somewhere around the mid-’70s.
Worryingly, I can even remember the name of it. It was a Micronta LED Digital Watch; available from Tandy / Radio Shack. Mum & Dad must have bought it well before Christmas because I remember finding it hidden away and I used to sneak looks at it.
It was the type where you had to press a button on the side to view the red digits. It was fantastic as I remember. But, not the safest of things to look at when riding your bike as it was a both-hands-off-the-handlebars-and-don’t-look-at-the-road job. “Why yes Doctor, actually I do know the time of my accident; it was 17.34 and 23 seconds”
From there I remember moving on to cars and was always fitting some accessories like Cibie spotlights, Harry Moss Graphics Equaliser and then a set of “gauges and dials” that I realise now, did nothing other than absorb horsepower. This was not something my eleven hundred cc Mk1 Ford Escort could afford. As I recall, if I had the spotlights on, it couldn’t manage a hill start.
And now, we have a house laden with gadgets; TVs in most rooms, smartphones, iMac, iPads, etc. Even the fish tank has a multi-array LED lighting system that moves from blue light at night to white light during the day!
And so to Morrison’s Supermarket.
Not the epicentre of hi-tech gadgetry, but they have at least moved on from adding up your bill by hand on a paper bag. They flirted for a while with those self-service systems where you recorded everything you put in your trolley on a hand-held device. Then, at the checkout, some techno-system using your previous levels of accuracy and a comparison of what was recorded on the hand-held with what “looked” to be in the trolley, worked out what you had to pay.
The tiny flaw in this system was not a technological flaw but a human flaw, that of honesty. Most people are intrinsically honest. However, when confronted with the opportunity to “put one over” on a corporate giant, our honesty tends to wither slightly. If a bank’s hole-in-the-wall machine dispenses six £10 notes when you pressed the £50 option, do you rush inside the bank shouting “‘scuse me, ‘scuse me I think you gave me too much money!"?
Many people wouldn’t, and many people didn’t always record everything that went into their shopping trolleys.
Many people wouldn’t, and many people didn’t always record everything that went into their shopping trolleys.
In fact, there was some very creative stacking and grocery placement inside the trolley. I guess some people would have feigned surprise when, on a random check of their trolley, four bottles of vodka were found “walled-in" by two boxes of Rice Krispies and two of Daz washing powder with a 12-inch pizza as a lid!
These are the people who had learned their skills at the Pizza Hut "help-yourself" salad bar where they could arrange lettuce leaves as sidewalls and construct a tower of salad 14 inches high. Something which surely led to the development of help-yourself salad bar fair-use policies; subsequently taken up by broadband suppliers.
So now, Morrisons has introduced self-service checkouts. The gadgeteer in me was drawn inexorably towards them this week. I have used self-service before at Tescos and Asda. But, it turns out that Morrisons seem to have got it wrong - badly wrong.
Firstly, they are always breaking down. There were two assistants required to reset them every 30 seconds this week and only 3 of the 4 tills were in service. How does this save costs and resources for Morrisons? I had a run of 10 items where each one resulted in a fault needing an assistant override.
Secondly, how thick do they think I am? For every item, I was told “please scan the item”, “please place the item in the bagging area”. Ok now I might be a bit slow, but after the third item, I was getting the idea. You scan the item, you put it in the bag. Not hugely difficult. By the 15th item, I was really naffed off with this stupid woman’s voice. By then I reckoned I could be employed as a trainer I was that good at scanning and bagging and REALLY did not need to be told what to do anymore.
And thirdly, good gadgetry is a combination of good technology and good ergonomics. Morrisons fail on both. The technology, as mentioned above, is poor. The ergonomics? Well, it doesn’t take an Egg-Head to work out that the three main areas of the system: taking stuff out of your basket, scanning and then putting stuff in the bagging area should all be within reasonable reach. Oh no, on a Morrison's system the ergonomics designer clearly had the arms of an orangutang. It is not possible to take stuff out, scan them and then bag them without moving to the right shuffling left then shuffling left again and then running back to the beginning again.
However, I finally found a rhythm that worked though.
If anybody saw me on the security cameras this week - they would have seen me doing a dual impersonation of an Olympic Speed Skater with flailing arms and James Brown as the Reverend Cleophus James in the Blues-Brothers doing his sideways glide.
Self-service, less hassle?
I don’t think so...