Unpopular Opinion: Self-Checkouts Should Be Banned From All Staircases
Dr. Pat Hypothesis argues that machines designed to save time have no business lurking near steps, baskets or his personal sense of dignity.
By Dr. Pat Hypothesis. I have reached the only reasonable conclusion: self-checkouts must be banned from every staircase. No tasteful little platform with a fern will solve this. Keep them off steps, landings, escalators, fire escapes, and any ramp with ambitions. A machine that asks me to weigh a banana has no standing to assess my footwork.
This began in Upper Muckleby. Halfway up a staircase in the Department of Retail Geometry, I found a self-checkout displaying a single instruction: PLEASE CONTINUE UPWARD. It then accused me of putting my basket in the bagging area, which sat three floors below and was briefly floating over a fountain. I hadn’t bought anything. I was carrying a coat and a private grudge.
Its defenders call it convenient. Convenience is panic wearing a name badge. A checkout on a level floor already asks me to identify an item I picked up with my own hand. Put it on stairs and the potatoes can be declared too light. The receipt rolls downhill and enters local legend, while I negotiate with a turnstile that has formed opinions about loose change. This is an obstacle course with a keypad.
“Flat surfaces were becoming emotionally crowded.”
There was, naturally, an official. Ozwald Plink, the staircase lobby’s senior compliance gremlin, explained the arrangement from inside a transparent umbrella. Flat surfaces, he said, had become emotionally crowded. I accepted this at once. The umbrella contained a tiny desk, two stamps, and what looked like the moon’s spare key. Ozwald also said every completed transaction shifted the staircase one inch left. I have measured nothing since, on principle.
The problem gets worse at the cereal. Defenders cite the sacred freedom to scan your own box, which ends when that box sits on a step marked CAUTION: THIS STEP IS A RECEIPT. Scan too quickly and the machine sings a low note, then seeks a second opinion from the bannister. Take your time and a bell rings in the ceiling. Every nearby staircase becomes alphabetical for a while. I refuse to shop within a system that has grammar.
My grievance is personal. On a normal floor, I spent nine minutes persuading a checkout that my reusable bag was neither a bag nor reusable, but a minor coastal weather system. It congratulated me for buying a turnip I had not seen since childhood. Beside a staircase, that turnip would have acquired a driving licence, joined a brass band, and billed me for parking.
So the rule is simple: self-checkouts may operate in shops, sheds, submarines, and the occasional moon crater. Never on stairs. Staircases are for feet, dust, and lost buttons. They have enough to do without carrying a machine that treats a barcode as a moral referendum. I will defend this policy until the last scanner beeps, or until Ozwald returns my coat. Whichever happens first. I am standing on level ground.