Your view: supermarket self-service checkouts

My main problem is with the smarmy voice that assumes you have forgotten how to use the system if you take more than 5 seconds to wrestle an item out of your basket and never gives you enough time to to pick up the next item before telling you to scan it. Or that says “Please” every single blasted time it speaks. Or that tells you to insert your card when you are already entering your PIN. Or the lack of a working volume control or mute button.

I always use the self-service checkouts if there is one available but the vocal prompts need work. When Morrisons first started to use them in my local branch it was literally impossible (and I mean literally impossible) to put one item in your bag and scan the next item before the voice started nagging. I queried it with a manager who just nodded. They (and Sainsburys) had been allocated the checkouts because ASDA had just opened in the town that same week.

The Daily Mail article mentioned by Jane Frost above seems very sensational and contains unnecessary and unjustified slurs on the cleanliness of Polish and other Eastern European food factory workers. With so many hundreds of millions of sandwiches being sold each year and, so far as I am aware, a very low statistical incidence of food poisoning from supermarket sandwiches, so long as good hygiene and infection control procedures are in place [as appeared to be the case in the factory featured] there is no reason why food should not be touched by bare hands; in fact, as was stated in the article, there are advantages. The workers seemed to be provided with very good protective clothing to avoid the risk of contamination from all parts of their bodies other than their hands and the plant looked very clean. I wish all pubs and cafés were run to such high standards as that factory.

Sorry – off-topic I know, but I felt I just had to comment.