The Madness of Australian Supermarkets

Recently, I visited my local Coles supermarket to do a little light food shopping.

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. What a privilege… 🙄

If you’ve been following along with the concerns of Supermarkets x The Cost of Living (and let’s be honest, who hasn’t) then surely I must have a tree sprouting an unending supply money to be able to shop at a Coles so frivolously.

But alas, it’s the one supermarket close by that stocks some of the food items I enjoy regularly putting in my face hole.

It was while I was there I realised the utter madness that the state of supermarkets in Australia has truly become, and I don’t just mean the price gouging that’s occurring on every day items.

After wrestling for a moment with a small row of trolleys that clearly hadn’t seen a drop of water since they were manufactured, I went in for the things I came for. I don’t need to shop all that often and wanted to buy a few odds and ends that I couldn’t get elsewhere, and a couple of products that I needed to pickup for later in my week.

Happy days. My shopping adventure had finally begun, and from there it was a fairly good experience. For about a hot minute.

Because turning the corner, I soon realised I’d have to meander around the staff packing shelves. Now if this was much later in the day then I’d have understood.

It wasn’t quite 5pm on a Monday afternoon. Which as you can imagine is a pretty darn busy time given parents have just done the school run and have decided to duck into the supermarket for a couple of things.

Why on Earth the shift manager had thought that packing shelves at the busiest time of the day was a great idea is completely beyond me… yet, here we were.

But no, this day supermarket gods weren’t in my favour, and I suspect almost every weekday it would play out quite the same.

So I continued to trudge deeper into the bowels of the store in search of those elusive items I needed. Weaving my way through half-broken cardboard boxes, four way trolleys strewn about the aisles, and slack-jawed staff more interested in what they got up to on the weekend than actually doing anything in a remotely efficient way.

The place was absolutely packed. It was sheer dumb luck if you could get a trolley cart, let alone a basket to shop with. So I felt truly blessed with the cart I had.

After 15 minutes of deftly manoeuvring around the store, slipping through gaps in the crowd, dodging shelf packers, and generally finding the things I wanted to purchase I’d had enough and made my way to the front of the store and brace myself for the checkout experience.

Let me paint the scene for you.

Imagine a gleaming row of nine supermarket checkouts. Each with their array of magazines and small confectionery items, a clear conveyor belt, and a smiling attendant eager to help customers on their way.

Ok now immediately forget that scene of serene bliss and instead replace the first four of those checkouts with self-serve stations, and all but one of the remaining five attended registers… you guessed it… closed.

The store was chock full of people in all kinds of states who wanted to do little more than get their stuff, pay for it, and promptly leave. Some had kids with them, others attempting to use two hand baskets because they couldn’t get a trolley, and then there were those truly 1% individuals who were juggling four or five large items by hand.

But the thing that united them all?
Their hatred of self-service conveyor checkouts.

This was evident to such a degree that the people who only had one or two items were flatly refusing to even entertain the thought of approaching one. So you can imagine the look on the poor 15-year-old checkout operator’s face—who’d only just started her shift—when 30 people lined up to the single attended checkout.

Here’s where it gets really interesting.

I took it upon myself to ask a passing staff member to open another register to help get people through the epic queue forming and was promptly told “We’re not allowed to.” by a rather blunt grey-haired mid-fifties worker.

Sadly, I wasn’t shocked at this. For the past few years it’s become commonplace to see my local Coles supermarket understaffed, especially in places it matters most.

The addition of the small self-serve checkouts a decade ago was the beginning of a slow decline of customer service in Australia. So it stands to reason that they’d eventually progress towards larger belt-fed versions to reduce the number of staff required to serve customers.

In the eyes of a corporation, the fewer staff customer touchpoints required, the fewer staff you need—right?

So from a purely economic stance, why would you pay multiple workers $50k each to attend a register when you could drop in an efficient unit that’s highly automated and get the customer to do the labour for free instead?

Sounds like a CFO’s wet dream.

So there I was with a full trolley and a choice. Either wait for the fourteen people in front of me to get through the uniquely staffed register, or use one of the self-serve checkouts. Hmm, decisions decisions.

Naturally, I chose the latter. But what happened next, completely baffled me.

As I placed my items on the conveyor belt, the very same staff member who told me they weren’t allowed to open any more staffed checkouts just started to scan the items I’d placed on the belt.

Now, I didn’t need the help. So I thanked her for the effort and explained that as I’d chosen to use the register I was happy to scan my own items.

Immediately—and without question—the staff member glared at me like I’d pissed on the graves of her ancestors, stopped scanning my items, walked to the very next self-serve checkout and ushered the next person in line through.

And here is where the true irony exists.

Somewhere between multiple on-screen errors, nattering away to herself, and telling the customer that she “absolutely fucking hates these things” under her breath, she’d only managed to scan perhaps a quarter of the new customers items before I finished.

After paying I collected my cart full of once empty bags, now positively brimming with hideously expensive items and as I pushed the cart through the door of the shopping centre I paused to wonder, how the hell did we ever let this late-stage capitalist nightmare occur?

🫳🎤