Just come back from town Storforth lane is starting to flood again!!!....so beware.

I went to W H Smiths in Ches the other day, bought just one item, nobody on the cash till, so had to self serve, which I did, went off tp the market square, then realised I had left my phone on the pay machine...luckily, the proper cashier came back and rescued it...

Wow that was lucky smithy 266

A pity for the town centre...as more folks will shop out of town....maybe they could try free parking, that would help the town centre shops?

Supermarkets have without a doubt caused the demise of the "local shop". Everyone nowadays has become accustomed to buying in bulk and shopping maybe once or twice a week but no matter how much stuff they get from the supermarket they will inevitably use their local shop during the week for one off items.
When I was a lad there were at least 32 shops and businesses in our village, 3 pubs and a club and no one had even heard the word supermarket, now there are 2 pubs a club {only just} and less than a dozen shops and businesses.

I often wonder if supermarkets would benefit by going back to the old shop system. Basically walk into say Tesco C/C and be met with one long counter with manned tills evenly spaced along it and all the goods behind the counter {a bit like Argos} give them a shopping list, sit back and wait for someone at the rear to pick your order and wheel out your goods, then pay and leave, with a few tweaks here and there I reckon that could work.
   No more shelf stackers, or delivery van pickers, getting in your way, no more constantly asking people to move because they are stood talking blocking the aisles no more prices going up because they have to recoup losses through shoplifting......no more shoplifting which also  means less spent on security.

Anyway back to my favourite topic........shopping!

I went to Sainsburys at Whitt moor yesterday and I was literally ripping my hair out. stood at a checkout with two others waiting, and waiting because the couple being served kept disappearing into the store picking things they had "forgot", so decided, against my better judgement, as we only had half a dozen items to go to the self service tills. These tills are not me friendly, and we couldn't figure out what we were doing wrong as we couldn't scan stuff so I asked one of the staff to help and she just shrugged her shoulders and said "I'm not on this section" in the end I said to the wife look just leave the stuff and we'll go to Tesco when another member of staff offered help and asked why we didn't ask, I said we did and was basically ignored {we only went in there because we needed Argos}.

There might be changes afoot in stores, it appears a lot of them are starting to scrap the self service tills. I'm not surprised, they must have lost millions to people only scanning half of what they've got in their baskets and it serves them right too.