Wouldn’t this count for the writer also?
Not surprised you enjoy her you’ve described yourself there!
Wahey!
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Is Patrick Freyne anything to the Patrick Freyne, Patsy Freyne, the man The Sultans Of Ping F.C. really wrote “Give Him A Ball And A Yard Of Grass” about?
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Column by Roisin Ingle on self service checkouts. This has been done to death by right wing Daily Telegraph columnists. What next - a column about women taking too long to get change out of their purses?
I’ve had to rethink my long-held antipathy to self-service checkouts
Years ago, when I first encountered supermarket self-service checkouts, I decided that I would not be engaging with them. It was hate at first sight. Even the initial comic novelty of a disembodied voice warning of “unexpected items” in the baggage area or telling me that “help is coming” soon wore off.
Something always went wrong with the machine or, more accurately, with my ability to scan barcodes. I’d end up asking the supermarket staff for assistance and feeling like a dope.
Ever since, I’ve looked admiringly at the people self-scanning their sweetcorn and rashers with expertise. Fair play to them. Knowing my limitations, I wheel my trolley or lug my basket to the old-fashioned checkout. Here, help is not “coming”. Help is already at hand in the form of a, usually, smiling human being.
Maybe self-service checkouts are a younger person’s game, but I don’t know that I’d have enjoyed them at any age. In London recently, I was forced to interact with one in a vast supermarket where there didn’t seem to be any conventional checkout options. I nearly came to blows with my neighbour at the next machine, who was visibly agitated because my frozen pizzas were spilling on to his purple sprouting broccoli. The general atmosphere around the self-scanning facilities was febrile and tense.
In protest at having been forced to use the self-service checkout against my will, I accidentally on purpose neglected to scan a carrier bag. Apparently, I am not alone in my petty pilfering. The self-service checkout era, designed to increase sales and reduce staffing costs, has reportedly resulted in a rise in shoplifting and carrier bags are the least of the supermarket giant’s worries. But even this has not stopped the relentless self-service tide.
Customer pushback
Still, there has been some customer pushback. One supermarket chain in the UK, Booths, has ditched the self-scanning machines because customers said they didn’t like them. Another, Asda, has expressed a commitment to increasing the number of old-school checkouts. But these are outliers, as far as I can see.In more hopeful news for us self-service refuseniks, in some countries there appears to be a move towards what some are calling “slow retail”. Two supermarket chains in France and the Netherlands, Carrefour and Jumbo, have in the past couple of years introduced slow checkout counters, designed to allow the shopper to take their time and actually have a chat with the checkout person.
In Jumbo, these are called kletskassa (chat boxes), while in Carrefour, the purpose is even more clearly signposted: blablabla caisse or blablabla checkouts where you can indulge in as much blah or banter as you fancy. In Canada, one supermarket chain has introduced “slow social lanes” where there’s no need to rush and staff are trained to keep the conversation as well as the groceries flowing. The Dutch supermarket initiative is part of a government-backed campaign to combat loneliness. I wonder if they’ll catch on here.
I’ve been thinking about checkouts because of a recent experience in Zara. This is a shop I usually stay well away from. I associate Zara with one of my most glamorous and tallest friends. Not being either glamorous or tall, I did not think it made clothes for the likes of me. As Ru Paul might put it, “Category is: short and roundy.”
On the hunt for a dress for a special occasion and having exhausted the three places in town where I can usually find something that will (a) fit me and which (b) isn’t covered in flowers, I wandered into a vast Zara not feeling hopeful. Within minutes though, I found a black party dress, a denim jacket and flowing maroon silk kaftanesque yoke, reduced from €50 to €6. I was delighted with myself, and headed to the dressingroom to see if they would actually work. They worked, even if admittedly I don’t know where or when I’ll get a chance to swish around in the maroon kaftan yoke.
Outside the dressingroom is where things got really interesting. I noticed people seemed to be buying their own clothes without the help of a cashier. Self-service in the clothes shop. What was this sorcery? Yes, I now realise, having breathlessly announced this “discovery” to several friends and my despairing teenage daughters, that this is old news. I’m told it’s been possible to self-checkout in many clothes shops, from Bershka to Penneys to H&M, for several years. But look, I’ve had a lot on lately and this innovation had completely passed me by.
I was also stunned to discover (more groans from my teenagers) that you can just put your items in the checkout bin and, automatically, without any barcode scanning, the amount you owe will appear on a screen. This, a lovely young Spanish shop assistant informed me, is due to something called radio frequency identification technology. The machine even knew that my €50 silk-adjacent extravaganza had been reduced to €6. Now, I had to take off the security tags myself, or at least ask the nice Spanish lady to do it for me, but it was seamless, the complete opposite to the self-service nightmare at the supermarket.
In fact, the whole experience was so delightful, I’ve had to rethink my long-held antipathy to the self-service model. So if you see a short, roundy lady in a satin kaftan struggling at the supermarket checkout machine, do say hello.
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That’s as far as I got
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I worked with Freyne many, many moons ago in a summer job. He was a decent skin back then and very funny. He was in a band at the time who had supported snow patrol just as snow patrol were starting out.
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My strong impression of him from rare online interactions is he’s a lovely fella altogether, and he’s a good writer.
Myers has me down as an unlettered tattooed proletarian lout. Hard to argue.
Unsurprisingly, the full article is pure scutter.
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Bravo
I’d say the kids in her school playing handball off her forehead probably soured her opinion on all things gaa.
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Jennifer went to the Ursuline, a hockey school. She didn’t like it there and was taken out of it and put into the local borstal for upper class children, Newtown School, a Quaker school. Newtown was a hockey and cricket school. I doubt if the GAA played any role in Jennifers upbringing and she probably has the standard outsiders dislike of it.
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Pretty sure she had a column during covid giving out about the championship draw taking place live on rte radio in the morning because nobody cared about it and they shouldn’t be subjected to it.
Sat Nov 28 2020 - 01:00
There is an increasingly marginalised cohort in Irish society whose needs have been largely overlooked during this lockdown. People who don’t like GAA.
This demographic includes the silent minority who prefer other leisure pursuits. Those who might have enjoyed a round of golf or a game of tennis over the last couple of months, for example. Those who would have loved to go to a play, and were perfectly prepared to wear a mask and sit two metres in any direction from the no more than 50 other people in the theatre. Those who wanted nothing more than to attend Mass in an almost empty church. Or those who just wanted to see their grandchildren.
In a pandemic, there’s nothing exceptional about exceptionalism. Everyone wants the thing they enjoy to be the thing that is exempt from the guidelines. As we’re learning, not everything can be exempt. Still, there’s something particularly special about GAA exceptionalism.
Hospital Report
Back in October, sharing his thoughts on Level 5, chief medical officer Dr Tony Holohan said he was in favour of the inter-county championships going ahead because it would lift the spirits of the nation. It was, he said, “important to try to preserve some of that kind of activity to give us all something to look forward to”. “That kind of activity”, of course, being the GAA.
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It’s certainly true that, as a society, we’re in thrall to sport generally, and Gaelic games specifically. Otherwise, how to explain the 9½ minutes of peak, 8.35am airtime on RTÉ’s Morning Ireland given over recently to an interminable hurling qualifier draw? Or the endless, largely unchallenged commentary about why “we” needed the All-Irelands to happen this year? Or the broad acceptance that the championship should go ahead when families are being kept apart, and small businesses shut down? Or the reluctance to speak out when GAA club celebrations were linked to outbreaks in several counties in September and October?
Cans on the couch
This isn’t about bashing sport which contributes hugely to communities and wellbeing – at least for those who actively participate in them. It’s less certain what the contribution is for those who sit on the couch at home with the lads, drinking cans while the games are on.
It’s about pointing out that other things make a contribution too. And it’s about wanting the rigours of consistency and science to be brought to discussions of compliance and restrictions during a pandemic.
The very public issues with breaches of Covid restrictions have more often been with supporters than with players
In this context, the case for GAA exceptionalism really hasn’t been made. Take all the arguments about why the inter-county championships are “different”, because they involve serious and elite athletes. This analysis overlooks two things: those serious and elite athletes have day jobs that mean mingling with other people on the Monday morning after a game. And the very public issues with breaches of Covid restrictions have more often been with supporters than with players.
GAA exceptionalism is why, when I was researching a piece on Covid clusters in a particular area in recent months, nobody wanted to be quoted on the record about the extent to which the outbreaks were attributable to post-match partying. They were worried about the backlash it might spark locally. And now it has led to frankly bizarre inferences that the breaches of guidelines surrounding GAA games are somehow less risky or more forgivable.
Asked at a National Public Health Emergency Team (Nphet) briefing last week about video footage of celebrations following provincial title wins, Holohan – incidentally a member of Templeogue Synge Street club – appears to have decided he’d had enough of admonishing us about our compliance and “standards of behaviour” and that, in some circumstances, we’d all do better to turn a blind eye.
Match vs job
“Teams that win titles and important matches tend to celebrate. That’s not a surprise. I think we all have to have a certain understanding and tolerance and acceptance in broad terms. I think we have tipped too much as a country into a sense of blame and trying to find the latest person who is in breach of a particular guideline and trying to find a lamppost to hang them from,” he said.
Participating in raucous post-match celebrations is tolerable, but going to your job is reckless?
He’s absolutely right about the futility of the blame game – but that benevolence should be extended to all of society equally. This is the same Holohan who, just a few days earlier, was worried people had “slipped” and that carparks and canteens were full, as people were “choosing to come into the workplace and meet up and have engagements”. So participating in raucous post-match celebrations is tolerable, but going to your job is reckless?
To be fair, Holohan is not alone in his insistence on special status for the GAA. The GAA itself asserted it in August, when it demanded then-acting chief medical officer Dr Ronan Glynn meet with it and present “empirical evidence” for the decision that all sport would go behind closed doors. Minister for Justice Helen McEntee – a niece of the Meath football manager Andy McEntee – has also insisted it was “appropriate” for the championships to go ahead because “sport is a really important part of people’s lives, not just playing it, but watching it”. She wasn’t talking about just any sport, of course.
We’re due to exit Level 5 shortly but it will be a temporary reprieve. So now that we’re officially in a strategy of rolling lockdowns until V-day – that is, whenever it is we get enough of the population vaccinated to declare the pandemic under control, and go back to deciding for ourselves who to hug and when – it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect that the decisions about what to reopen should be based on facts and that empirical evidence. Not hunches, not anecdotes, not personal value judgments about what lifts anyone else’s mood – and certainly not the leisure-time pursuits of members of Nphet.
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From the rugby team right through to Paul Mescal, Finn has gone through the full spectrum of Irish men there.
Misogynist post
Mysogny crew out in full force this morning