Blog

Dec 17, 2023

Soon we’ll all work part

This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order

This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Retail is changing. Customers used to be quite popular. Now they’re regarded as a nuisance.

Take corner stores, as ever, riddled with passive-aggressive handwritten signs. We don't cash $100 bills. DO NOT lean on the counter. No washroom. No refunds. Three per cent fee for credit card payments. Back off. Go away.

I greatly enjoy stores like this, mom and pop places that are fed up to the gills with customers — who can blame them — and display it in small ways: you’re not wanted here. Buy your kettle chips and get out.

But chain stores are heading this way too. Loblaws is now pushing self-checkouts at some of its stores.

They’ve already done this at Shoppers Drug Marts: one stressed cashier with a long lineup of disabled customers, lottery ticket buyers and me. Everyone else is laboriously self-checkouting their own purchases. Great. Go ahead. I can't be bothered.

But Loblaws, now winning new fame for being as unreliably stocked as Ikea, is pushing customers to unload entire carts of items, beep them, bag them, pay, and load them back onto the cart.

That's hard work. I’d do that kind of meticulous slog for my family, my employer and maybe my nation but I’m not doing it for Loblaws.

My local store no longer has a seven-items-or-less checkout. You must wait behind family shopping carts towering with product for a smaller number of cashiers. People grind their teeth and abandon their carts.

What I do is shop at stores that have cashiers or order online from stores that don't dislike their customers but are beautifully indifferent to their desolation.

There are drawbacks. Ssense.com is lovely. Amazon is a crapshoot. It is indeed possible to mess up the simple triangle that is the metal coat hanger. They charge me the import fees they once ate. ("They flee from me that sometime did me seek" — Sir Thomas Wyatt, 1535)

Retail is fickle. Retail lets you down. Retail gives and then it takes and keeps on taking. Pretty soon you have two jobs, your actual job and your gig as a Loblaws cashier. Retail used to love you. You thought. Now it's looking for a new business. Retail health clinics are hot right now.

Retail is everyone's bad boyfriend.

I want sunglasses. At Holt Renfrew — perhaps a bulk shoplifting crisis? — all sunglasses are attached to the wall by dog leashes, meaning retractable anti-theft cables. (Why so fancy? The great scandal of the sunglasses industry is that it's a near-monopoly.)

I pull the glasses over to what looks like a rearview mirror to try them on. A salesman says no, I must express an interest in each pair, wait for him to detach them from the cable, and try them on as he watches.

In other words, he wants to do his job. He is the Loblaws cashier I wish I had. But now I want to do the work myself. I madden him.

Nordstrom has the same sunglasses, but perched on racks like the goldfinch in Carl Fabritius’ famous painting, now untethered, eager to sit briefly on a human face. There are two attendants and one actual concierge who brings over possibles and offers advice. Giddy, I pay a crushing price for somewhat inappropriate sunglasses.

That, to me, is retail. The store wants your money. You just want. It fakes liking you. It knows your puffy little heart. Come back soon, it cries, waving.

The best retail is Home Depot, a place where nothing interests me. They have one bathroom floor tile I can stand. I buy it. There is one suitable bathtub. I make it mine.

I study every one of their hateful wall tiles until I enter the state of silent screaming of which Big Retail dreams for all its customers. "I pray to a wild god, I will pay absolutely anything to get out of this place."

Home Depot: What you see is what you get. Me: I’ll take it.

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com