Amazon chuck out the checkouts

A pint of milk, and a lifelong sense of paranoia, please...

Supermarket shopping. It’s hard to describe it as fun.

Whilst your trolley etiquette may be top notch, everybody else seems to park theirs at a rakish angle, stop where you can’t get past them or generally make a nuisance of themselves in a myriad of depressing ways.

The supermarket always seems to have moved things around, forcing you to tour the whole store only to have to go back to the start to find your favourite baked beans that used to live at the other end.

Once you’ve queued interminably behind the elderly couple who put their corned beef and spam tins on the conveyor one at a time, you then face the checkout assistants. Despite the risk of offending them all so much I can never set foot in a shop again, I’ll offer my opinion that they fall broadly into the categories:

• Insanely cheerful and chatty. What do they know that we don’t? Why do they think this is fun?


• Proficient but they’d gladly strangle you with a Bag For Life if it got them off-shift 5 minutes earlier.


• Unable to identify a potato on their roller of loose veg prices, or accept that you’re over 18 when you’re 50+.

Handily, those friendly folks at Amazon (they don’t want to take over the entire world, honest) have spent a year testing out a store with no tills, conveyor belts, or awkward conversations about why you’ve got 26 tins of custard.

By simply scanning a QR code on the way in, the system will recognise you and, using cameras and sensors, detect what you’re putting in your bag as you peruse the custard section (I’m presuming there IS a custard section. They’ll have lost my custom immediately if there isn’t).

Once you’re done, you simply walk out and your shopping is charged to your account. Fast. Efficient. Thoroughly scary. If George Orwell, author of dystopian nightmare Big Brother, was writing his book today, he’d probably see this and decide his story wasn’t nearly paranoid enough.

Still, we already give away information about ourselves every waking (and sleeping) moment – from our phones and computers via fitness apps, location data, where we shop, what we read, what websites we visit etc.

Amazon already know what I’ve purchased going back 10 years or more, and track what I’ve looked at on their website so they can show it to me again later, or compare it with something else. All very useful, as long as you suppress the urge to run screaming from the house and throw your computer in the nearest lake. Not that that would help.

Replace “Santa” with “Amazon” in the Christmas tune about the jolly chap coming to town and you get “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he know if you’ve been bad or good, other users purchased The Best of The Nolans after viewing Sheena Easton’s Greatest Hits”.

Still, if you bury the fear that a faceless gigantic corporation knows everything about you with minimal control over what they do with that information, then this shop sounds great. The beautiful irony is that, on it’s first day of opening, there was a gigantic queue anyway... to get in.

Remember: Until it comes to the UK, adopting this process is called shoplifting.

This post first appeared as the main piece in my column/page in The Mail and the News & Star, on the 26th of January 2018. Good to see the strapline for the page has been updated to "A wry look at the week", which feels a bit more 'me' than the previous "Cumbria's grumpiest columnist". This week's page 2 teaser just had the previous photo of me, and "Columnist Peter Grenville" under the heading of "Opinion". Fair enough...

Still haven't seen a copy of the News & Star yet, but I'm presuming it's the same layout. 

Nice to have the freedom to not have to stick precisely to 500 words as, with the other two smaller pieces and images, the layout can accommodate going over or under.

Not entirely sure of exactly how many times I'v now sneaked Sheena Easton into a column (must be half a dozen by now) but this is the first outing for The Nolans.

(CD A-Z: KT Tunstall's "Tiger Suit".)