Checking out the self-serve supermarket

Woolworths haave introduced self-serve checkouts. These are filthy little tracts of land where you swipe your own items, bag your own groceries and manage your own payment, all under the watch of a teenage invigilator who swoops in without notice and publicly chastises you for 'doin' it wrong'. This has to stop.

People go to supermarkets for different reasons: some go for fruit and veg, some go to get food for their rodent-sized, hand-bag dwelling, door-stop of a mutt. I go to feel superior.

Sure, I usually grab some supplies while I'm there (nutmeg, Vaseline and picnic forks), but the main aim for my visit is always to bathe in the atmosphere of servitude.

“Fetch me a basket!”
“Give me half a chicken…”
“Point me to the figs!”

It's wonderful. Someone has created a domain that I can lord over like a benevolent duke, sliding into town to keep a watchful eye on his mischievous, shelf-stacking serfs. I order people around, make a mess, take what I want. On the way out, someone tallies the goods I've selected and I hand them a paltry sum of coins - in this fantasy of course the amount means nothing to me – and I know that I have single-handedly prevented them from starving in the long winter ahead.

It's a wonderful quarter-hour of self-delusion that hinges entirely on the checkout being manned (or rather, boy-ed) by some down-trodden whelp with a healthy dose of face-braille. It's the last point of contact with my village of servitude; my last chance to bark an order, pardon a fool or beat a peasant before the mundane reality of my life comes crashing down around me.

Not only do these 'self-serve' abominations rob my experience of the key moment, but the roles are in fact reversed. Instead of being able to yell at a minion for some minor infraction of etiquette, the tables are turned and the lord becomes the lackey.

This has to stop, Woolworths. Either you get rid of these topsy-turvy checkouts, or I'm taking my feelings of superiority to Coles.

- Lord Valentine, Earl of Nutmeg