On A Visit To The Supermarket

To serve, or not to serve, that is the question:
Whether 'tis easier on the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous waits,
Or to take one's self to the sea of troubles
That is the self-checkouts. To wait - to fume,
No more; and by betrayal of the check-out staff
The heart-ache and the thousand natural redundancies
That time does come when we, Consumer, shall do the work
For free and Business shall rejoice and profit more.

With apologies to The Bard.

I confess that when I have a few items and there are queues at the checkouts at either of our supermarkets (The Coop and Tesco) I will use the self-checkouts. 

However, Tesco is about to get rid of almost all it's serviced checkouts. I can just imagine the chaos that will ensue as many people try to adapt to putting a huge basket of a week's shopping through the self service till and pack it into their bags. Apart from that this is a small community. The checkout is a sociable place as well as a place of commerce. Tesco's plans may or may not go smoothly but with no realistic competition so far as price goes Tesco will have it their way like it or not. The customer is only a cash supplier: a feeder of profits. 

And when they ask to go through my shopping and check that I did it correctly what will I say? I will respond "No. You may not. If you insist that I do your work then you will trust me. After all you have probably seen every move I've made and every thing I have bought on your CCTV. "

SID 71. A Matter of Trust

I've not been in Blogland much for a few days. The garden has needed my time again and it's been a welcome escape from the fact that I've been strangely unsettled. What has unsettled me? Something that I would never have thought would have even made me give it more than a disgusted or disdainful thought. After all I worked with politicians all my working life. I've learned to take their sincerity and their insincerity and treat those two qualities with an equal degree of detachment.

Despite the effect that President Trump is having on the world and it's economy it's not something I can influence so I've ignored it. Living in Scotland we've been fortunate in having a First Minister who has a very high acceptance rating in her dealing with the present Covid-19 pandemic. However our British Prime Minister now has a negative rating. Why? Largely because of his support for and total reliance on his chief special adviser (Dominic Cummings - a political appointee not a civil servant) who has been the architect of Brexit and the Government's response to the pandemic. In this government he is arguably more powerful than the Prime Minister and certainly than any member of the Cabinet. 

Despite the Stay at Home slogan and edict, of which he was the author, DC ignored it and drove, with symptoms of Covid-19, with his wife, who also had symptoms, and their 4 year old son 260 miles to stay in a family home on the family farm "to be near child care if needed". There is a great deal more to it than that, of course. However what is absolutely clear is that he disobeyed the spirit and the letter of the instructions in many ways. He has refused to resign and the PM has refused to sack him and told the public to 'move on'. The furore rumbles on. The whole point that no one at the top seems to grasp is that the author (or approver) of the rules has broken them. It does not matter how small the break. It does not matter that you and I would have been hauled over the coals for doing what he did. It's a matter of trust and credibility.

Regardless of his ability, the ability of the PM and their political colour the sheer arrogance, the sheer treatment of the populace with total contempt is on a scale that I cannot recall in my lifetime. And, let's face it, we've had some pretty significant scandals in that time.

It's unsettled me and made me feel sad for the future. 

However this really was what the sunset from my conservatory looked like at 10.30 pm last Sunday:

So life's pretty good really.