A fruitless crime: The issue with supermarket self-checkouts

You have reached your maximum number of saved items.

Remove items from your saved list to add more.

Save this article for later

Add articles to your saved list and come back to them anytime.

Most of my crimes are fruit-related. One morning, I headed into the supermarket to get a banana for breakfast, only to find that all the good ones were gone. The only ones left were green. Then I saw a perfectly ripe banana in the Free Fruit For Kids basket. I looked around. There were no children in sight. Reader, I took it.
I went to the self-serve checkout and paid for it, but still, I felt like a criminal. I had taken that banana out of the mouth of a child.

Photo: Simon Letch

I wonder how many petty supermarket crimes occur simply because people get cross? Take the self-serve checkout, with which I have an on/off relationship. Today, I put a pear on it and it went off. Beep. Unidentified item. I stabbed at the Fruit, then Pear, then Packham buttons, but it was a fruitless exercise. Beep, beep, beep. Meanwhile, everyone was looking at me as if I were the type to steal fruit from a baby.

A second banana-adjacent incident made me realise how sadistic supermarket planners can be. You know how they move your staple products (such as Vegemite) to different shelves so you’re forced to wander around looking for them and, therefore, spend more time in-store? They do the same at the automatic checkout – just for fun. Cavendish used to be the first of three banana options until, suddenly, it wasn’t. It was the third. Too late, I’ve automatically hit the first one and am forced to pay for lady finger bananas, which are far more expensive.

And let’s not even discuss the bag issue. If you don’t have a bag, you set off the beeps. If you bring your own bag, you set off the beeps. If you pay extra for one of
their bags, it hums sweetly, rolls over and wants you to tickle its tummy.

In happier news, the giant Dutch grocery chain Jumbo recently introduced a “chat checkout” in its stores in a bid to reduce loneliness among its ageing customers. You can take your goods to the kletskassa counter and have a chat with the teller as your purchases are handled. I’d happily go to the one remaining queue where you can transact with an actual human being if I could, but I think they’d just clock me as an unidentified item.

[email protected]

The best recipes from Australia’s leading chefs straight to your inbox.