That unexpected item in bagging area is you doing all the work for your supermarket

Some people find enlightenment in the quiet of a church pew. Others discover it in an ashram or a synagogue or guitar-strumming or circle-drumming or tunnel-humming. My own moment of clarity came a few weeks ago, after I’d slogged my way to the front of the queue in the Very Special Fruit Shop I Patronise Under Absolute Sufferance And Only When I Have Exhausted Every Other Local Option (seriously, that’s its full name), as I was fantasising about unleashing the flying sidekick to end all flying sidekicks on its newly installed customer feedback machine.

“Michelle,” the retail gods whispered sweetly, “you don’t actually have to do anything.”

Would you like to give some gratuitous customer feedback with that? Credit: iStock

Before we go any further with this tale of consumerist woe, I should probably pause to explain a few things about the Very Special Fruit Shop. It’s actually part of a larger chain of Equally Special Fruit Shops, but it is to normal fruit shops what haute couture is to pleather.

In addition to fancy apples and fancy bananas, it also sells fancy baked goods, fancy smallgoods and fancy meat, including vacuum-sealed, grain-fed, organic beef and lamb, which comes with its own stat dec personally signed by the animal, attesting to the bucolic existence it led before being hand-massaged to sleep and dying from an overdose of happiness at the prospect of being eaten.

“This is to certify that I am the healthiest dead creature ever.”Credit: Getty Images

And if that doesn’t leave you eager to shell out (insert astonishing number of dollars) per kilo, you’re welcome to hear, via in-store voiceover, about how frequenting the Very Special Fruit Shop ensures you are supporting a family-run Australian business. It’s enough to have you feeling all the feels as you contemplate the deepening bond between yourself and their extended clan: the close relationships, the sense of shared industry, the multimillion-dollar property portfolio. See? Don’t worry, your invitation to Chrissy lunch is bound to arrive any day now.

There are a great many customer service-related ills for which I blame the Very Special Fruit Shop, primarily because I have spent a frightful amount of time contemplating them while waiting in line for other customers to buy exactly the same products they could get for less money (but crucially, way less social cred) if they schlepped over to Woolworths, which, in this particular plaza, is literally two shops away.

Try as I might, though, I cannot find it in me to blame the Very Special Fruit Shop for Woolworths’ latest initiative, which has been billed as a digital trolley, but looks, to my untrained eye, like it should really be called One More Thing Michelle Has To Do To Buy Stuff Even Though She Isn’t Technically On The Payroll (see also: bag bringer, trolley finder, dollar coin acquirer, trolley procurer, new product suggester, queue manager, self-checkout operator, staff member locator, trolley returner, dollar coin securer).

Attention, major supermarkets: see that unexpected item in the bagging area? It’s a customer seeking an actual employee! I appreciate that the “scan-and-go trolley”, as it was described earlier this week, “will help both save time and balance the budget”, but I’m hopeless with tech, I failed maths and, quite frankly, I probably need assistance from someone who knows the answers and whose attitude doesn’t stink (so, once again, let’s put a line through me).

All of which brings us back to the Very Special Fruit Shop and the customer feedback machine that turned me into The Karate Kid’s Mr Miyagi with a handbag. I was already on shaky emotional ground that day, triggered, as I was, by the memory of the previous weekend, when I arrived in the queue to find 51 (yes, 51) people ahead of me, and a handwritten sign on the wall warning that, through no fault of the Very Special Fruit Shop, its systems were down, with thanks in advance for having patience (note to self: add “patience haverer” to the list of unpaid employee roles I now fulfil).

The customer feedback machine, oblivious to my irritation and immune to the vagaries of the card-only registers, gleamed shinily. Was my shopping experience today: very smiley-face ecstatic, moderately smiley-face happy, moderately sad-face bad, or very angry sad-face terrible? And then, as I prepared to smash the very angry sad-face terrible button with the flying sidekick to end all flying sidekicks, I had my epiphany: I might be a professional patience haverer and unofficial retail employee, but I am not a qualitative researcher. I could pay, take my organic, grower-certified parsley-with-a-social-conscience and high-tail it out of there, feedback be damned.

And then – naturally – I discovered that while I was having my moment of retail enlightenment, a queue of five had materialised at the inexplicably unmanned checkout. Friends, I wish I could report that I stuck to my guns and did not add qualitative researcher to my résumé, but instead I smashed that very angry sad-face terrible button with all my might, dumped the parsley, and clocked off ahead of an early lunch break. Honestly. Sometimes good help is so hard to find.

Michelle Cazzulino is a Sydney writer.