Why I hate UK supermarkets

I dislike shopping in UK supermarkets. It’s the checkouts that get me, and I blame the slow shopping movement of southern England. Adherents of this movement, and there are many of them,  believe that, as well as buying their groceries when they attend supermarkets, they are buying cashier time. The longer the checkout process takes, the more cashier time value they get. They can select from an armoury of methods to increase the checkout value proposition.

Southern England cashiers are tolerant of slow shoppers. It is the slow shoppers’ human right to take as long as she likes. When fronted with a slow shopper, the cashier folds her arms and enters a static state, smile frozen on lips.

A slow shopper’s armoury consists of a number or tactics that she can adopt. Slow shoppers use one or more of these tactics per episode.

Bag minimizer
The Bag Minimizer laboriously packs and then re-packs items into her shopping bags before paying, taking great care that, in each bag, the types and shapes of the contents are coordinated. This bag minimization packing process is similar to solving one of those wooden block puzzles that require fitting irregular-shaped blocks of wood together. The Bag Minimizer does not rest until each plastic shopping bag is a solid rectangular box, with six smooth surfaces. Due to the random way that the shopping passes through the checkout process, this involves multiple unpackings and re-packings, or re-solving the block puzzle several times. Hard-core bag minimizers coordinate on colour as well.


Finance illiterate
The Finance Illiterate pretends not to be aware of the relationship between money and the process of buying groceries. The fact that the cashier expects a cash amount for the groceries comes as a complete surprise to the Finance Illiterate. The Finance Illiterate apparently thought groceries were free. The hard core Finance Illiterate extends on this theme, and the cashier also has to explain what money is.


Searcher
When the groceries have been packed and it has been established that there is a monetary cost involved (and not a second before), the searching process can begin.

The Searcher typically carries a large sack-like bag that contains all of her personal belongings. Searching involves removing items from the  bag one by one, until finally a purse containing the cash or card is produced. If it's a card, the cashier often has to explain the theory of automatic cash transactions, and how the automatic teller machine works. The Searcher typically manages to locate two or three ATM cards, and has to try each a number of times, before she can get one to work. If a Searcher pays in cash, she starts a new search in her sack for the exact money amount in paper and coins. This involves rootling around in the sack for extended periods, with all the care of a fossil hunter searching for dinosaur teeth.

I struck an interesting embellishment on this in Waitrose in Wallingford one Saturday morning recently. A classic searcher was attempting to collect enough money for her grocery bill. She conducted an iterative process where she would rootle through her bag for loose change, which she would find a coin at at a time. She would add this coin to the little pile of money that she was accumulating, then laboriously she would count the pile of money to see if she had sufficient yet. Then, after numerous iterations, just before she had reached the required amount, she decided that there was no more coins to be found in her bag, and the cashier had to teach her the theory and practice of using an ATM card to pay for the groceries.


How it's done in Paris
It's refreshingly different in supermarkets in Paris. Parisian checkout staff make short shrift of the slow shopper. Each checkout has two grocery packing areas, separated by a wooden gate-like barrier. So after pricing a customer's goods, with slow customers, the cashier promptly slides the gate across to isolate the slow shopper’s purchases, and begins pricing the next customer's goods. The slow shopper can thus take as long as she likes to go through the packing process. The finance illiterate method is a non-sequiter in Paris. No-one dares to try it with a Parisienne cashier, for fear that the result might be a physical assault. And with the searcher, the cashier spits on the ground and demands to know if the searcher really wants to buy these goods, because if she does, she had better stump up the euros sharpish. If not, then it is no problem at all to shovel the shopping into one of the baskets at hand, and hand it off to one of the supermarket goons for re-shelving. In fact, the clock is counting down as the cashier speaks, and a goon stands nearby looking as if there is nothing he would rather do than to re-shelve those goods.

Probably as a result of this, there are many less slow shoppers in Parisian supermarkets.

My very first job

The building where I work now happens to be opposite the building where I worked in my very first job after leaving school. Where I worked is a three story, very 30s-ish looking building and I was surprised to see it still there looking exactly the same as it did  back in '69 when I was there, right down to the "McPhersons" label in metal in '30s-type font. (only now it's surrounded by skyscrapers). The ground floor was a very big hardware shop back in the day, but it has been turned into a food hall now. I worked in a metallurgy lab on the roof. Anyway the other day I arranged a meeting with my SME on the 12th floor and the room overlooked my old building. I could see the old lab building on the roof where I worked very clearly. It's a creche now. It was a strange feeling, like looking down from above on a past life.

That was an enjoyable job, my first job although I didn't realise just how unusual that was in a job until later of course. I was studying metallurgy part time and working in the lab, testing metals in a many sided variety of ways. I used to test in tensile machines specially machined bolts machined out of all sorts of metals. The scariest were large inch or more diameter cast iron samples. You'd screw them into the tensile machine and you'd never know when they were going to break. They would suddenly go with no warning and a huge bang at 30 or so tons, and the whole floor would jump. With most other samples, like steel, the samples would get to a certain point and then stretch like chewing gum and it wasn't so noisy or scary even though it took more tonnage to break them. We had a selection of slide rules to help calculate the test results. No calculators in those days. 

There were all sorts of metal tests, such as hardness tests and shearing tests. On some of the shearing tests, we had to soak the metal samples in liquid nitrogen first. The liquid nitrogen was delivered in a large metal bottle -- a sort of thermos arrangement. There was always loads left over after we had done the testing, and we used to have fun with it. For example one fun thing to do was to nick a prized soft possession belonging to someone, and soak it in liquid nitrogen for a while. That would make it as hard and as brittle as glass. Then you would waggle the object under the person's nose to gain their attention, then hurl it to the ground where it would shatter into a thousand fragments. What a hoot. Well we only did that once actually, with a special soft eraser that my manager was very fond of.

They had a large array of funky tools for cutting and slicing and polishing metal samples to test. At the time, there was a large project to  lay pipelines for natural gas pipelines in Victoria, and one of my jobs was to examine pipe welder test  samples to see if they met quality standards. You would get a half metre sample, two hefty pieces of half inch steel plate welded together like a T and you would have to get a 2 cm square sample of the weld from that. So first there was the large powered mechanical hack saw to hack a cross section out off the sample. Then you would use a sort of angle grinder in a cabinet that you could clamp samples in, close the lid and control how it was sawed with a couple of hand wheels. You would fillet a sample out of the cross section -- a manageable piece of weld about 2 cm square and a cm thick to work with. Then you would use a sort of surface grinder with a magnet to hold the sample and fine control wheels to control the grinder, to get a smooth-ish surface on the sample. They you would use an emery paper disk thingy to get it smoother, Finally, you would polish the sample with a polisher that looked like a turntable with a cloth finish, smeared with black diamond paste until the sample was mirror smooth. Then you would conduct micro-hardness tests all over and around the weld to check the hardness. You would then photograph the sample with a large old camera that used glass plates, develop the plates in the lab darkroom, trace the weld from the photo, add the hardness test locations and results to the tracing, and submit the photo and the accompanying tracing to the standards body. Very amusing way to spend time, that was. They had a serious dark room and a large array of cameras apart from the glass plate one. They had a good 35 mm camera and a light meter. TTL light metering was a new thing back in those days. 

The other guys who worked there were a playful lot. The hardware store personnel downstairs used to refer to us as "the boffins," as we assembled in the canteen at lunch. There were some serious 500 card players in the group, and we used to play 6 handed games over lunch. I had played a lot of 500 in the country where I grew up, and when they realised I could hold my own, I regularly got a game ahead of some of the lab staff who had been there much longer than me. If you stuffed up, either made crazy bids or didn't do what you were supposed to, you were out and never got game unless they were desperate for the numbers. The hard core players took it very seriously. 

We used to have elastic band fights there to amuse ourselves. You had to shoot the band from one hand only, held like a pistol. Once I managed to shoot a cigarette from someone's mouth from about 12 feet away using that method. Man, I'll never forget that -- the joy in seeing that cigarette fly from surprised lips.

There was another lab technician there who was the only man I have ever met who joked about the small size of his dick. He used to carry on when the mornings were cold that he had to take a pair of tweezers to the toilet, and hunt around to locate his dick before he could have a pee. He was most amusing, and an inveterate womanizer despite his much discussed physiology.

Melbourne Redux

So, back to living in Melbourne after a ten year absence. Melbourne as a resident is a different kettle of fish to Melbourne as a flying visitor, when with each succeeding visit over the past ten years, Melbourne seemed more and more like a city in another country.


We're living in our little house in Carlton. I have lived only briefly in this house in the past, for a couple of weeks before we embarked on our European adventure all those years ago. However I lived in the Carlton/Fitzroy area for a while in my 20s, and the area holds many fond memories for me, along with a few nightmarish ones. One thing I have always liked about the area is the architecture, and it is a relief that I still find much beauty in the streetscapes here. When we first planned to return, I thought perhaps experiencing the wonders of English and European architecture would lead to a different perspective. But I still find that the streets and houses in this area have appeal. The honest cottages interspersed with the more grand ones. This area is one of the first to be built on in Melbourne, and the architecture reflects the varying statuses of the residents, lumped together by circumstance. Our house is a small worker's cottage, plain but with a solid, utilitarian feel to it. Its two bedrooms will have seen many families over the years.