On line shopping: the antidote to a modern nightmare. But it needs skill

Isn’t a visit to the supermarket one of the more dismal experiences of life today?

They do try to make it less unpleasant. Wide aisles, plenty of light, background music (though I’m not convinced that tinny music, particularly the kind most supermarkets play, does much to enhance the experience rather than the reverse). However, no attempt to improve the feeling can disguise the fact that essentially it’ s just a long haul, up and down aisles, in an often forlorn search for the most essential items on your list.

Have you noticed that, if you’re after 25 products, you’ll find the first 20 in no time? Then comes you can’t remember whether the cat food is on aisle 16 or 52; by the time you’ve checked them both out, some kind person in a uniform jacket will tell you that it’s actually in aisle 2, back at the other side of the shop. Then you start the same process over again, looking for olive oil.

Having walked the equivalent of three miles up and down the aisles, you will now have 23 of the 25 things you wanted. That’s when another kind assistant will tell you that one is in aisle 4, the other in aisle 76, and even accompany you to both, to establish that both products are out of stock.

A joy of modern life

By this time, the tills that were all invitingly empty when you first arrived, have filled up neatly with six-deep queues, complete with squabbling kids and shoppers who’ve picked up the burst bag of flour or the wrong brand of peanut butter, and need to dash across the shop for a replacement.

You may choose the self-checkout instead. This’s always a wonderful experience. 

“Using your own bag?” it asks you. 

You press “Yes”. 

“Place your bag in the bagging area and press done.” 

You do that. It asks you to do it again. You do. It asks again. You call the assistant over. She turns up just as soon as she’s dealt with the five other people with queries; she swipes her card and taps in a code. The machine returns to normal, looking smugly satisfied, as though there was never a problem in the first place.

“They get a bit temperamental on a Friday,” she says.

“As well all do,” you reply, and then start scanning items again. Until the machine interrupts you once more.

“Using your own bag?” it innocently asks.

It’s the joy of that experience that has made me such a fan of on-line shopping. It’s brilliant. A few clicks and a whole supermarket trip is done. In fact, the really good thing is that it even keeps track of your favourites so that you can produce a whole new order just by whipping through a list of what you most frequently take, and deciding what to include it in this week’s shop.

Sadly, though, it’s not quite as simple as that. You do have to make sure you’re clicking on the right items and choosing the right amounts. I’m not always quite careful enough, as I discovered over the last couple of weeks. I seem to have fallen into the habit of ordering grated cheese all the time, leaving me this week without butter, on the brink of running out of coffee, but with a fridge that looks like a grated cheese repository.

Inside my fridge
It’s not like there’s a shortage of the stuff

The odd thing is that, though I like grated cheese, I’m not that wild about it. Then again, my subconscious may be telling me otherwise.

Or perhaps I just need to learn to handle a computer touchpad more skilfully.

Internet teething problems: on-line ordering

We haven’t really mastered that internet thing yet, have we? In particular the whole ordering on-line business.

Apart from anything else, it seems to me that there ought to be a load more services available. The NSA and GCHQ ought to be able to send us helpful little messages that pop into our inboxes:

‘You ordered the Provence Herbs version last time. Are you sure you want the Lavender this time?’

It would allow those wonderful securocrat establishments to do a little gentle marketing to improve their brand image. I modestly suggest the strap line:

This message brought to you free of charge, 

courtesy of the NSA/GCHQ [delete as appropriate]. 

Spooks at the service of people

Even without that, I can’t help feeling the actual logistics needs seriously looking at. I mean, I ordered a tube of aftershave balm the other day. It would fit comfortably into a pocket. Metaphorically it would fit into the mouth of some of our more opinionated politicians (I leave it to you to supply a name or two here).

But the company chose to send it in an elegant box, swaddled in bubble wrap, in a much larger box half of which was filled by what I think of as ‘single-bubble non-wrap’: you know, one of those huge plastic bubbles of air whose only purpose seems to be to fill the space in packets that are too big for their contents.

The container and the thing contained
Proportionate? I think not

As well as being an affront to any reasonable green sensibilities, all that bulk meant the postman couldn’t get the package through my letter box. So I had to wait for a moment when I’d have the time to pop down to the sorting office, which only came this morning, two full days after the attempt to deliver the package. 

Once at the office I took my place at the back of a queue of twelve people. With six people, you have a reasonable chance of getting to the counter quickly, but once you get beyond six, simple laws of probability mean that you’re practically bound to have at least one person in front of you who:

• has come for a parcel the post office has mislaid 
• didn’t bring any proof of identity 
• denies having ordered the thing delivered and thinks this is somehow the post office’s responsibility

This morning, there were two of these troublesome customers ahead of me.

Once you’ve been through all that, little of the convenience of ordering on-line is left. I mean, the sorting office is further from my home than the shop I used to buy the stuff from. And in the shop there wasn’t usually a queue.

In fact, the only reason for using the on-line service is that the shop no longer stocks the particular balm I favour.

It feels to me as though we’re living a period similar to the 1850s or so. Then it was the railways, today it’s the internet. The new technology has already revolutionised society, but it’s still in its infancy. We have a lot to learn to make it really efficient.

Still, I’ve got my balm. The on-line service did work, even if it hasn’t yet quite learned to work well. I suppose I need to be grateful for small mercies.