I think I’m one of the few people who actually experiences heightened anxiety when going through the self-serve checkouts as opposed to the people-operated ones.

 

Like being able to Snapchat someone your poo, the self-serve checkout was a novelty at first but has now evolved to become a regular fixture in our everyday lives. And it seems to make sense. Scanning your items yourself cuts out time spent lining up and the machines are cheaper for supermarkets to run than living, breathing, profit-sucking employees. It sounds like a win-win.

 

In a world where it’s trendy to hate people as a collective (not enough to spark a mass genocide, but enough to make people justify their hermit-like behaviour, distain for human interaction and general self-loathing as an edgy honesty about people being insufferable instead of admitting that they might just be a bit of a jerk) the self-serve checkout is a glistening beacon of hope in the bleak and misty wasteland that is our cultural landscape. Don’t get me wrong, it would absolutely be a godsend for people struggling with social anxiety, those with communication impediments and a host of other people for whom going through a manned checkout would be daunting, if not impossible. It’s also really useful for someone wanting to buy something quite embarrassing like a candle that has absolutely no scent and is set in a ceramic bowl with words like “tranquil”, “love”, and “enlightenment” written around it in a curly script. But for me, the self-service checkout it a thing to be feared.

 

First of all we need to address the overwhelming guilt I feel when approaching the row of automated cashiers that I’ve put an actual cashier out of a job. I don’t want to know that I’ve forced some long-fingernailed teenager with baldy-drawn eyebrows and an inappropriately-buttoned work shirt out of a job. I don’t want to come in the way of her phone bills, her obscenely overpriced Schoolies accommodation or her ability to bribe an older relative to buy her Cruiser Double Blacks to get her smashed at the weekend’s house party. I don’t want her to have to settle for regular guava Cruisers. She’ll need twice as many to get her drunk enough to interpretive dance to a Flume song and all that extra sugar will go straight to her hips. She can’t have that extra weight with the formz coming up, and I won’t have that extra weight on my conscience.

 

But sometimes I am in a hurry, and have to get my one kilo bucket of hummus back to the office for a makeshift lunch when I work through my break. Usually, these are the times when every man and his dog are clogging the lines. Even the 12 items or less aisle is jammed with arrogant arseholes who can’t count to 12. So I scoot through the self-service section and hang my head in shame.

 

I tell myself that it’s a hummus emergency and the self-service lane is really like a 12 items or less aisle without the requirement for the scanner to drop everything and serve the people buying cigarettes at the adjoining counter. Because everyone knows some wanker wanting to poison their body with smoking while slowly crippling our public health system deserves priority over a patiently-waiting shopper so their can get their death sticks faster.

 

So the prospect of taking more than five items through the self-service lane feels like I’m being a giant hassle to all the other people out there just trying to get their lunch-replacement hummus before deadline. The idea of taking an actual trolley full of items through the lane is like a huge rude finger to all other shoppers. There is no way that you can fumble around with scanning, bagging and loading your items into the trolley with the same speed as a trained checkout assistant. No way.

 

Because they were built for speed, there’s this unspoken vibe of “hurry the fuck up” in the self-service aisle that doesn’t exist elsewhere. This sense of urgency heightens to a panic in the busier periods. You nearly crack under the pressure to get out of there as fast as humanly possible. It’s like the shop is the sinking fucking Titanic and the self-service lane is the line for lifeboats after most of the women and children are gone; every bastard is scrambling to get through as fast as they can at any cost. You half expect someone to shoot into the air or shout “your money can’t save you anymore than it can save me”. You don’t have time to muck around; there’s too much at stake.

 

Then of course comes the fear that you’ve stolen something. Now, I’m not one who can usually cope with guilt, cheating or deceit of any kind. Maybe that has something to do with the poem we were forced to perform in primary school about Ned Kelly, his hanging death and the chilling climax of a room full of children shouting, “crime doesn’t pay”. Whatever the reason, I can’t handle dishonesty on my part of any kind except if I deem it to be for the greater good (i.e. that lie the nun told on Paradise Road which ultimately saved Glen Close’s life or pretending to get a text just as a Foxtel telemarketer makes eye contact with you in a shopping centre). I have a few mantras I like to live by. “You don’t wanna root some grot” is one of them. But the old chestnut “honesty is the best policy” is probably equally as important. Unfortunately, the second one is harder to follow when you find someone has accidentally left a container of salt they purchased in a plastic bag and you’ve unknowingly loaded that bag with your items and wonder if you have to flee the country. Imagine the surprise and shame you feel when you unload your groceries and pull out an unpaid for item and discover that you’re a criminal. It’s unpleasant and, quite frankly, not worth the risk.

 

Grocery shopping is supposed to be a simple, mindless errand and the kind of technology our grand species keeps devoting energy to is supposed to make it even easier. But let’s not pretend this particular development is the holy grail of purchasing moderately-priced goods. Just like being able to send a picture that last for 10 seconds of your leavings to a friend, just because we can do it doesn’t mean we should. Or at the very least, we shouldn’t do it every time.