Checking out B&Q

B&Q in Sutton has just entered the self-serve checkout age. Walk in from the lower level car park – this branch has two floors – and pick up a couple bags of compost, some guttering and maybe a flimsy trellis. The collection weights a lot, so you’ve got an open-sided trolley to ease the burden.

Head for the checkouts. The self-service terminals are bang in the middle of the line of tills and there are four of them, arranged in two lines of two. Somebody’s thought this one through because there is sufficient space for two trolleys of the kind you’re pushing to enter the area in front of the self-serve tills, side by side.

And yes, they’ve been carefully branded, decked out in B&Q orange with a series of instructions on how to use them and a gun for zapping items that are too heavy to remove from the trolley. At least the design side of things has been taken care of then, with customer flow and an on-brand colour scheme in place.

But hold on a minute, why are queues forming to use these machines and why do shoppers at the normal tills seem to be getting through the whole thing rather more quickly than you are? The answer, unfortunately, seems to be that they don’t work very well. There’s a time and motion man standing next to the self-serve area. Presumably he’s from the company that encouraged B&Q to go down this road, and he’s trying hard not to get involved. This isn’t proving difficult as he’s not wearing the requisite apron with a name badge on it and might therefore be mistaken for a customer.

Instead, two members of staff, one of them obviously a Saturday girl, are trying to stem the growing tide of shopper ignorance and incompetence as the tills don’t quite live up to their billing of making things easier and quicker. Now comes the clincher. You finally make it to the front of the queue and position your trolley so that you can zap the compost bags without taking them off the trolley – they’re heavy. The till tells you to put them into the bagging area, while allowing the lightweight trellis to remain on the trolley. You struggle to comply, hurting your back.

It’s taken around 10 minutes longer (or so it seems) than going through the regular checkouts. All in all, a triumph of design and a bit of theory over practice. Perhaps this works in supermarkets, but currently, it seems problematical in DIY world Sutton.