The CORNER STROP

I’ve been queuing at Costcutter. You nearly always have to queue there because, although there are two tills, it’s rare that both are open, even when (as just now) there are people waiting to pay.

I was only in for a paper and I had the correct change. In years gone by, I could have waved my paper, called to the woman on the till that I had the correct money and left it on the counter. You can’t do that now because they get in a panic if they can’t swipe the barcode. How would they know what to enter on the till?

Costcutter is a chain of small general stores. In my childhood, most such shops were independent businesses and you saw the same proprietor and/or his wife and/or an employee at the till every day. They knew you and of course they let you owe them a few pennies until the next time if you didn’t have the right money. That’s impossible now because the shop staff leave so frequently and none of them has the power of such a profound executive decision. The branch manager is too important to work the till.

What’s more, if you had to wait even a moment or two, the old-style shopkeepers would be profuse with their apologies. At Cocksuckers (as we call it), the staff are blithely unaware of the customers. They are wholly absorbed by the challenging business of swiping barcodes, haphazardly loading plastic bags and picking out the correct coins to make up the change that the till tells them to give.

I can’t abide standing uselessly in a queue, forced to listen to the extruded plastic that passes for musical entertainment on the chain’s ringmain. It’s made worse by the stupidity of so many of the customers who, like the woman in front of me just now, pay a £3.47 bill with a credit card (“would you like Cashback?”). I don’t anyway approve of chain stores selling a small selection of newspapers and downmarket magazines, thereby taking custom from the newsagents who try to keep a good range of publications (“Plays International? Oh, I don’t think we stock that”). But my need for more exercise is not so keen that I want to spend a good half-hour strolling to the nearest newsagent and back when I can get a paper at Cocksuckers in a few moments (not including the couple of hours of queuing).

Why I still patronize the bloody place I begin to wonder. Recently, they opened a new stand for the sale of reheated food. I don’t know how low an IQ you would need to register in order to trust a chicken portion microwaved by one of the inadequately trained temporary staff at Cocksuckers. Certainly the smell given off by their warmed-over pies would not disgrace an abandoned abattoir.

The other week, I called in there for a carton of milk. As usual, I had to wait in line. Behind the hot food stand, an assistant was extracting frozen chickens from a freezer and freeing them from their plastic encasements. After watching her for a while, I asked her whether she couldn’t open the other till so that those of us with purchases to pay for could cut our waiting time in half. “Not just now, no” she said. I listened for a “sorry” in vain. “Very well, then. I’ll go somewhere else,” I said. And leaving the milk carton on the counter, I stalked out. I imagined the other shoppers shaking their heads and tutting at my graceless impatience. I was tempted to stride back in again and ask the offending chit what the point of her being there was if it weren’t to look after the customers, this emporium being a shop for the retailing of goods to people whose patronage paid her wages. But I decided the moment had passed. It would have to stand as an esprit de l’escalier.

Of course, this kind of imperious gesture is a cutting off of the nose to spite one’s own face. I now had no milk and the aforementioned half-hour would have been necessary to devote to finding it elsewhere. So, conscious of the pitiful emptiness of the sequence of behaviours I was manifesting, I eked out what little milk was left at home for a few hours and then crept back to Cocksuckers, hoping against hope that the same useless assistant was not on duty to serve me (or not). Happily her shift had ended. I picked up the same carton of milk from the chill cabinet – the only one of skimmed milk left in the shop on both this and the previous occasion – and waited obediently in the queue, wondering idly how long the milk had stood meantime deteriorating on the counter.

Costcutter’s merchandizing policy has changed over the years that we have lived here. There is now a whole shelf of wines on sale. On those occasions when the queue stretches back along the shelves, I look wonderingly at these wines. A woman behind me clocked me looking at them one day and said pleasantly “makes you thirsty, doesn’t it”. Of course I should have agreed nicely with her and left it at that. But surveying the ranks of Australian Chadonnay and Chilean Rioja with their garish labels and their suspiciously low prices, I could only reply (no doubt rather unpleasantly) “there’s really nothing here I’d want to drink”. “No, I suppose not” she said, mentally putting me down as a snob, I feel sure.

Frankly, I trust Costcutter for very little that I would want to ingest. Their brands of prepared food are cheap and dubious, their supposedly fresh items look unappetising and their range of comestibles is dictated by the nature of the clientele, which seems to consist heavily of people who scoff rubbish in front of the telly. The old corner shop tradition of good wholesome fare from local suppliers has died and Cocksuckers, with its emphasis on snacks and knickknacks, does not fill the void.

At least there has been one welcome development at our branch (and so I suppose uniformly at branches all over the land). In recent weeks, a card has been standing on the counter displaying badges with flashing lights. All the badges have been functioning, creating an entirely oppressive spectacle turned towards the waiting queue. Had it not been for the injunction on the card not to touch, I should long ago have torn the card from its moorings and pitched it into the street. Now however the lights are off. Perhaps, as I have long predicted in my mind, some customer has suffered an epileptic fit. If so, I hope a writ is in the post. I know that I shall collapse with a fit at Cocksuckers one of these days: a fit of impatience and boredom.