Did I say I don't like shopping? I meant to... ...I mean I like shops for the choices they give the customer. Browsing is how we sort 'need' from 'want'. Choice like that is normally a good thing. But I refuse to use the automated tills that are now common in the cheapest shops. That is extending choice too far, and extending credit card living. They remind me too much of the present deadly news cliche 'the cost of living crisis' in which the economy is stuttering and faltering, but without any known cause. Nobody has done anything to cause it to fray from within and break down so badly at the edges. The economy is where buck keeps on going round and round. The buck has nowhere to stop because the lights may be on but there nobody home, and home is a place to be a nobody. Both the customer in the shop and the listener to the news are made to feel like automata, responding to what presents itself as life on autopilot. In these shops the customers feel hemmed in as they queue to pay, because in the narrow aisle they wait in they see all the choices they know they don't want whilst they wait to get away.
What happened the crisis of cheapness of forty years ago? When so much work that was once skilled, as if skilled work was once valuable, became devalued? When skilled labour became so cheap that it made deskilling and mass unemployment popular with employers? That was a 'cost of living crisis' indeed. Many who endured it would never get jobs, and if they did get a job then it was temporary and unsustainable until nobody cared.
Anyway, I went into this Poundland store in Belfast to see if they had CD cases. I live well behind the trends so I thought they might live there too. They seemed like the right sort of shop for my sort of 'well past it's sell by date' living. Instead of CD cases I found a crosscut hand saw, and decided that was what I really wanted. Mine was old and rusty, and it made hard work of any job I wanted it to do.
I got in the queue and got to where I was going to be the next to be served and stood well back. In front of me was a handsome elegantly dressed woman who happened to be black, she looked particularly splendid wearing an expensive looking grey wool coat. She said nothing to the shop assistant as she timidly handed over a floppy heart shaped foil coloured 'Happy Birthday' balloon. The tired looking shop assistant then had walk past four tills with the balloon, to apply the open end of the balloon to a helium dispenser to fill up the balloon. The machine seemed to take ages. The other customers were glumly submitting their goods to the automatic check outs and paying by card. The beep of the cash machines reminded of the gaming arcades I was never meant to go in as a youth. Suddenly, whilst I was looking at the queues approaching the automatic check outs, the balloon had become taut and beamed 'Happy Birthday' in metallic lettering against a different coloured metallic background to whoever looked at it.
The balloon now buoyant. The quietly irritated shopping assistant held the balloon in one hand whilst she cut a length of white plastic ribbon with the other. She tied one end of the ribbon to the base of the balloon. With the assistant now holding the balloon by its ribbon, she gestured for the customer to pay. The body language of the silent black woman shrank to that of a large child. Silenced by the tension of feeling made to wait and putting the shop assistant to such trouble without knowing that she was going to do that, she slowed the completion of the transaction down further by opening her wallet and fumbling with putting three different cards, one at a time she tried each of them in the machine. Each time the machine refused to process the transaction. With the fourth card and evidently the right PIN number she managed to get everything right, the payment went through. The shop assistant's pasty face visibly lifted to nearly a smile when she handed the balloon over saw the customer gone.
I stepped up and found to my surprise that the saw cost half what I thought it should cost, I had read the wrong label on the shelf. I fumbled for a lower denomination value bank note than the one I originally meant to offer her. I like cash and dislike cards, though they have their uses. For the British, who knew little of other countries, the queen was the most famous person in the world who did not carry money, and even then we knew she had a retinue behind her who would settle any cash based problem. Had I not seen it for myself I would never have credited how close we have come to similar airs and graces as we have appropriated with the common use of cards.
The visibility and limits of our cash were part of how we knew that we were real, and we were commoners. I still prefer to use cash in shops, just as I like to see human shaped bank tellers, even when what they can say is dictated to them by the contents of the screen they are facing.
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