Conservative, Not Capitalist

Peter Hitchens writes:

For once I rather expected people to be interested in one of my small column items - the one about boycotting automated checkouts. I think people are sick of the dehumanising of life and the inconvenience of it. In an amazingly short time, banks, insurers and many other businesses have retreated from their branches into call-centres and websites which in many cases can't really be reached at all if you're in any kind of complicated difficulty.

I find it almost incredible now that a few years ago I used a small, friendly bank branch where I knew the cashiers. It was just closed one day, and is now a tourist information centre, in a street that used to contain a wonderful three-storey second-hand bookshop, a model shop, a shoe shop, a post office and two banks and now has lost them all. You can guess what's there instead.

Mind you, I'm lucky. I live in a town that still has real butchers, greengrocers, bakers, cheesemongers and fishmongers, and I try as hard as I can to avoid supermarkets, which cannot begin to measure up to the freshness, skills and quality provided by proper shops - not to mention the human contact involved in buying from real shops.

Of course I use supermarkets. I'd have to be saintly to avoid them completely, and I'm not. The last time I ever saw a proper general grocery with a coffee grinder, a bacon-slicer, a resident cat and a chair for respected customers was when I lived in Earlsdon, a pleasing suburb of Coventry, back in 1976. But I really do seek to avoid the hypnotic madness of the 'Big Shop' in which, my blink-rate lowered by cunning lighting and my eyes seduced by colourful packaging, I buy masses of goods I don't really need, at surprisingly high prices, plus lots of good-looking but ancient fruit and vegetables which will go soft on the way home.

And it's plain that a lot of people earn their living in them. I'm told by Oliver Kamm, the Times blogger, that I can't really save any jobs by refusing to use the horrible, hectoring automated tills (‘Unexpected item in bagging area! Exterminate!’) that are now being introduced everywhere. He may be right, but I'll come back to that in a moment. I'm also told - correctly - that my position doesn't accord with the free market view. But how many times do I have to explain that market worship is not the same thing as conservatism? It's liberals who elevate the market to the position which ought to be occupied by God (socialists do the same with 'History' which in their case means the inevitability of the socialist Utopia). I've been making this point now for more than a decade, and some people are still surprised by it.

As for saving jobs, I think we can save the jobs of the checkout workers. Whether that means others elsewhere will lose theirs, I'm not sure. I would expect as a result to wait longer and pay a little more, and maybe the 'loss' to the economy will actually be in my time and cash, rather than in the elimination of a low-paid (but important) job.

I'm likewise in favour of bringing back bus conductors, railway ticket inspectors, park-keepers and all those people who used to keep a general eye on things and now don't. They would cost money, but I suspect that in the end they'd save it, by preventing all kinds of vandalism, fare-dodging and misbehaviour, whose costs are hard to measure but which eventually find their way on to our tax bills. In the case of bus conductors, they would transform buses from a slow, inefficient form of transport to a rapid and efficient one, as anyone who used to use them before one-man operation can testify. But all I can about this is to protest when conductors are abolished and call for their return.

The thing about the attempt to automate supermarket checkouts is that it depends on us - just as internet and telephone banking, with all their problems, could not have been introduced without our willing co-operation. If large numbers of customers simply decline to use these robots, and insist on queueing up for a human being, the supermarkets and hypermarkets will have to drop the idea, plainly in their minds, of automating the whole payment process.