I was born six months or so before the moonwalk. The subsequent years of my life were filled full of frenzied philosophies, newfangled notions and preposterous predictions of our future. However it was characterised, our future was to be full of shocks and surprises. We would colonise Mars; we would be wearing BacoFoil jumpsuits; we would travel via back-mounted jet-packs; we would have dispensed with food altogether, having replaced it with food-flavoured tablets; we would all be able to teleport ourselves around the globe (the final nail in the coffin of the airlines: they thought that soaring fuel costs and international acts of terrorism were a challenge).
As a child of the Seventies, I very much felt I was one of tomorrow’s people. But in among the cornucopia of concepts surrounding our Blade Runner-esque future, the one innovation I never expected to see was that of the supermarket self-checkout. Surely this has to be the most impressive of all future shocks? Imagine, if you will, a society so self-confident, so mature that it is able to trust its own shoppers to scan and pay for their own goods. We are here; we have arrived. As the banking system collapses around us, as world unemployment threatens to rise by 50 million this year and as governments crumble and tumble, at least we can be trusted to pay for all three satsumas and that Bounty bar that could be so easily masked (unpaid-for) behind a large bag of discounted kale. There is hope for western civilisation.
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