"It's so cool that literally every job now is understaffed by 30-50%. It's great because I didn't want whatever it was done well or with any care at all. But please keep raising prices anyway."

– @headfallsoff.com, via Bluesky

I saw this post earlier and it resonated. I'm sure that right now, wherever you are in the world, you are feeling some variation of this thought. You are probably also feeling as bewildered as I am at why this is all the case. Yes, the economy is fucked due to the AI bubble, private equity dominating everything and the stock market continually doing weird things (a shoe company "pivoted to AI" recently and their stock value exploded!), but surely some things are constant. Like, say, the need for groceries.

Our local big Sainsbury's is a prime example. It's a decently sized supermarket that serves a wide area in the town; it's conveniently located, as it's somewhat on the outskirts of the general urban area, and it's also near a number of local amenities, such as a doctor's surgery and bingo hall. It does plenty of business, as the car park is always pretty full and there are always people in it.

So why have I only ever seen one person actually on the checkouts at a time? There are like five or six conventional checkout lanes (plus a large self-checkout area for trolleys, and another separate large self-checkout area for baskets, inevitably with at least one person using a trolley in it) and there only ever seem to be about three people on hand at any time: one person begrudgingly staffing the conventional checkout, and two people milling around the self-checkout areas, occasionally noticing that yes, you are, in fact, old enough to purchase a can of Monster and gracing you with their woefully insecure three-digit user ID and password combo to confirm this fact in the eyes of the law.

"Just use the self-checkouts," you'll probably say. And that's sometimes fine. Except when you run into the inevitable Unexpected Item in Bagging Area incidents, or the aforementioned need to prove your legal worthiness to consume drinks that don't taste like anything Nature has ever produced, or you're buying a shirt with a security tag on it, or you're buying alcohol, or you have two packets of paracetamol in your basket, or… you get the idea.

A good example from my own experience is a rather middle-class problem, but it shows how these checkouts being inexplicably left fallow can be a genuine issue if you need to speak to an actual person in order to achieve something during your shopping trip. We have a SodaStream, and SodaStream does a thing where if you return your old gas cylinder at the same time as getting a new one, you get ten quid off the new one. It's worth doing, as it means you don't have to worry about disposing of bulky gas cylinders, and it's cheaper. Yet, as far as I'm aware, there is no means of carrying out this process yourself at the self-checkouts, meaning you need to go to a staffed checkout. If there's only one person working the staffed checkouts at any given time, this can mean you'll be in for a long wait. If you go in at the wrong time of day, when there are no people on the staffed checkouts, then you're fucked.

Like I say, it's a very middle-class example. But I'm sure there are other instances where you need (or just prefer) to interact with an actual human being, and there are times of day where that's literally impossible at this Sainsbury's. Why do they even have that many checkout aisles if they're never, ever going to use all of them?

Is it because they don't have the money to pay enough staff to man those checkouts? I doubt it, particularly since prices are through the roof. I can pop to the shop to get a few snacky bits and household bits and pieces — i.e. not a "big shop" — and easily spend £50 these days. That's more expensive than a video game! (For now, anyway.) I feel like if you spend more than it costs to get a new PlayStation game, you should come away with more than a few bags of crisps, bottles of drink and packets of cat food.

To be clear, I don't blame any of the workers staffing either the conventional checkouts or the self-checkout aisles for this. It is not their fault, and they probably wish they had more people helping out, too. It is, almost certainly, a failing of management, presumably initiated on the grounds that they want to "do more with less" or some other such LinkedIn platitude at their corporate overlords' behest. In that sense, it's probably not even the managers' fault, but instead, as with everything else, the blame can, without a doubt, be laid at the feet of the out-of-touch executive class and/or private equity.

One day we'll be free of all this. I don't know that. But I have to believe it. Because things don't seem to be getting a whole lot better right now, and the prospect of continuing to endure the world being such a shitty place is becoming increasingly intolerable.

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