It’s amazing what people will do when they think they’re not observed – and worse, what they’ll do in full public view without a frisson of shame.
Supermarkets report that since the introduction of customer self-checkouts, there’s been an astronomical surge in the sale of carrots. Apparently, unscrupulous shoppers are brazenly beeping through avocados, mangoes and other expensive items, (even steaks!) masquerading as cheap-as-chips carrots.
Well, if you rely upon the average person’s honesty and integrity, you’re likely to be sorely and frequently disappointed. There’s a devious streak in the best of us that runs all the way from illegal parking (hoping not to get caught) to tax avoidance, and many of us indulge in varying degrees of deceit.
The evidence is all too obvious – fly-tipping in back lanes, on country roads, unspeakable beach debris, pavements polka-dotted with chewing-gum; the beer bottle or burger-box abandoned on somebody’s windowsill, the popcorn bucket left under the cinema seat. Then we go home to watch ‘Blue Planet’ without a flicker of conscience.
But that’s by the way. I daresay self-checkouts speed customer throughput, but apart from their temptation to the opportunist, they reduce shopping to an impersonal soulless experience, not to mention cutting down the number of in-store employees. Automation is fine for the time-strapped, but half the pleasure of being a regular customer is the chatty exchange with the checkout staff, ever helpful, always good-humoured.
Of course the legacy of a supermarket shopping trip is the huge amount of household waste it generates – so many items unnecessarily double- or triple-wrapped and the problem of its disposal. We’ve had a multiplicity of bins and a similar number of council reminders about their appropriate use for some time. Public response has been patchy here in the northwest, the virtuous obediently discarding waste strictly by the book, the irresponsible hurling everything in at random.
I am wrestling with the black bin, the blue bin, the indoor food caddy, the outdoor food pail, (which I privately refer to as the ‘brock bucket’.) Also, the swing-lid kitchen bin and sundry other waste receptacles in bathrooms and bedrooms. I am demented sorting and squishing and rinsing and hovering between them, uncertain what to put where and having to fish things out again when I’ve got it wrong. It’s all very labour intensive and time-consuming, but I’m a civic-minded citizen and do not wish to be shown up in front of the neighbours by having a big ‘CONTAMINATED’ notice slapped on my blue bin, or a man from the council come knocking on my door to scold me.
There was a big scary article in the local press recently about the shocking degree of contamination to blue bin recyclable waste and its cost to the council – hundreds of pounds for every contaminated load. That’s my rates money – and yours. It was briskly followed by a warning letter to all householders that blue bins will be inspected regularly. They even put pictures of what is/is not permitted for those who won’t be bother to read the text. I’m all a tremble.
First greeted as the saviour of forests, who’d have thought that plastic in all its forms – strong, impermeable, protective, preservative, hygienic and well-nigh indestructible, would prove to become, literally, the bane of our existence? Now it’s smothering us, strangling our wildlife, poisoning our seas. Not a hedge or copse without its quota of tattered plastic bags fluttering like pale ghosts among the green; not a night-time city street without a polystyrene food container bowling along in the breeze. A generation ago, my mother shopped twice weekly, bringing home in two string bags bread in waxed paper, vegetables wrapped in newsprint and meat in bleeding brown paper parcels.
It may come to that again as plastics are phased out, but I, for one, am well-prepared. In the garage I have a secret stash – three large green garden sacks crammed to capacity with plastic bags of every size and strength. They’ll do me my day, and probably well beyond. I’m willing to share… say, at 10 pence each???
