Earth to Woolworths. We don't want to be your unpaid staff.

Over the weekend I went to do the weekly shopping at Woolworths.

I was surprised to find a couple of checkouts had been converted to a new type of automated checkout, it had a conveyor and was obviously designed to allow people to do the checkout thing with large amounts of shopping.

Now when they implemented automated checkouts that were designed for smaller amounts of goods I tried it once…you could tell this was technology designed for the benefit of the store, not the customer.

These new checkouts are more of the same.

Note to Woolworths management: You want to make my shopping experience better, implement RFID so that a scanner will pick up the contents of my basket/trolley without me having to do the barcode swipe thing. That improves my life.

What you’re doing now is making me an unpaid employee of your company, I don’t like that, and I’ll bet that the next thing will be a ‘service charge’ that will be levied if I have the temerity to not use the new tech and actually want someone from the store to scan the goods for me.

If I wanted a career at Woolworths I would have pursued one; I didn’t. So don’t try to force one on me now.

Woolies may be the ‘fresh food people’ but they’re also the ‘rank technology people’ as well.