The last few minutes of a supermarket shop can ruin everything that went before, but what can be done to better it?

”Unexpected item in bagging area” – whether the voice that informs you is male or female, this five-word phrase is the major deterrent to self-scanning.

All of us will have experienced this and translated what it actually means is – ‘you thought you were going to beat the queues at the main checkouts, but now you’re going to have to wait and this could take even longer’.

Journey’s unpleasant end

It’s a bitter pill to swallow, particularly when the chances are good that with increasingly winsome supermarket store design and layout you may well have had a reasonably pleasant time up to this point. But what can be done?

Well, one thing that might improve matters would be the tone of voice that is employed.

As thing stand, the ‘unexpected’ dictum has about it the feeling of shoppers being processed and any sense of the personal is almost entirely eliminated. So how about relaxing things a little?

‘There seems to be something unexpected in the bagging area. Hold on a moment’, or perhaps: ‘We’d like to help, but the bagging area’s clogged. Help is on the way’.

It might even be worth investing in a piece of software that offers a variety of different messages, with the same meaning, every time there is an unexpected item in the bagging area.

Might raise a smile and relieve the tension that accompanies the usual delivery of the message.

Strong language warning

Or how about an over-18 self-scan checkout? Here things could be a little racier: “WTF have you put in the bagging area? Hang on, I’ll get someone.”

Maybe not to everybody’s taste, but you won’t be able to say you weren’t warned.

And while some of these may just sound plain facetious, the principle holds good.

Shoppers are not in a store to be part of a glorified time and motion exercise. Or perhaps they are, but it doesn’t need to be blatantly apparent.

A large part of the continuing reticence to use self-checkouts must be that it is the ultimate example of old-school dehumanisation and little effort has been expended on overcoming this, while almost all other in-store areas have been made softer.

Checking out remains the fly in the supermarket experience ointment and it should be given due consideration by those seeking to steal a march.

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