Our local big Sainsbury’s supermarket has installed airport-style barriers everywhere and you now have to queue and scan your receipt to get out.
As a kid, I always wanted to live in some science fiction futuristic society. I never thought that I’d actually grow up to live somewhere where I had to scan to get out a supermarket only to be under threat of attack by ravaging killer dogs.
Proud of someone for damaging property? What a shitty community, honestly. Guy sounds like a cunt.
sci fi is about the present. Atwood said that everything that happened in The Handmaids Tale happened in real life — just not to white people.
So too, cyberpunk dystopias were happening while being made. Yes Akira has people with magic powers — but delinquent kids, government experiments on children, a brutalist police force that murders without question: all modern day.
Those gates are so fucking stupid. They barely work, usually one of the two actual gates doesn’t open, and the gates stay open long enough that multiple people can just walk through. I kinda really hate having to prove I’ve just paid for the things I’ve just overpaid for.
Our local big Sainsbury’s supermarket has installed airport-style barriers everywhere and you now have to queue and scan your receipt to get out.
what if you didn’t buy anything?
I’m not an expert on Sainsburys, really. We just used to shop there. Most of it is self-checkout but they do have 3 or 4 tills with checkout workers down at one end. I guess you could walk through there. Also there’s a security guard who I guess could let you out.
I only put up with it once - about 3 weeks ago - and haven’t been there since. We’ve done our family shopping there for 15+ years.
How does this work if you don’t get a receipt? Haven’t shops been pushing not to print paper receipts for a few years now
I don’t know. There’s always a queue because the scanner wasn’t reading the receipts properly and wlll only accept the receipt scanned once. We had to be helped through by a shopworker who checked we had paid. It was super-frustrating to wait and the gates were too strong to push through. We’ve just stopped going to Sainsbury’s now and just use our nearest Aldi.
Not really a surprise when you consider just how bad the cost of living crisis is to some people.
The fact that the article is mostly focused on stores selling food and essential items is telling (compared to things like USB cables, wrenches and succulent plants). Sure, there is a segment of young teens and pensioners that steal because nothing is as exhilarating. Decreased affordability, stagnant wages, more of the population left hungry or a paycheque away from being hungry encourages theft and illegal resale of essential goods.
If people were well-fed and prices were reasonable, there would be no need to steal these things and there’d be little demand for stolen food goods. To an extent, if jewelry cost £1 to buy then who would bother stealing it anyway?
Back to the main issue, what’s a hungry person on the street supposed to do, if begging for spare change barely gets you anything? Pick berries? Hunt squirrels, pigeons, raccoons and cook them over a rubbish fire? Food bank lines are getting longer, while other supports (like health and mental health support, employment resources, disability payments) are difficult to navigate and sometimes impossible without access to technology nowadays.
What do you expect when so many people can’t even afford basic needs?
