Marketplace of future faces a scary future

IREAD A story about the future of supermarkets recently, in which the writer suggested check-out operators will no longer be needed in the next generation of shops. Fewer people use cash. We seem to be following the example of North America where shoppers casually whip out their credit cards to pay for a soft drink. Already there are stores where customers scan their purchases and pay by sliding a card through the machine – no delay, no queue.

Future shoppers won’t even go to the shops. They’ll just sit at home, switch on the computer, go to the shop’s website, punch in the items they require and have them delivered (possibly by a drone).

That sounds like my worst nightmare. Why are we always trying to find ways of eliminating humans from our lives? What’s wrong with people? Some of my best friends are people.

If you retrace human history you will find it all revolves around shopping. We are a shopping species. The very earliest human settlements were formed when Gogg the Trog was a great hunter and could exchange his meat for the soft deerskin shoes that Ungg made. Ungg was a hopeless hunter but Gogg needed the shoes so he could stalk antelope without getting in his feet.

Right away there was the beginning of the shopping tradition. The Zhung family exchanged sharp stone axes for biltong and the Unggs swopped moccasins for sharp stone leather-cutting blades.

Almost every historic town and village was originally a cluster of houses gathered around a marketplace.

Look at the place names right here in the city – Greenmarket Square, Longmarket Street, Shortmarket Street. People came from far and near to park their wagons, outspan their mules, meet old friends – and shop. Marketplaces were where the latest news was exchanged.

People learned who had been married and who had died since last market day. They heard which districts were suffering from drought and where there were locust swarms and where there was an outbreak of chickenpox.

The marketplace is our natural habitat. It’s where we gravitate to be with our fellow humans. If you take away the human element and replace check-out staff and store managers and merchandisers with machines you will be destroying our natural habitat.

We have seen what happens when the habitat of any species is destroyed. Whether it’s the polar ice cap or the Amazon rain forests’ extinction. That’s what happens.

Last Laugh

A man hated his wife’s cat and decided to get rid of it, so he put it in the car, drove 10 blocks and tossed it out. When he arrived home there was the cat strolling down the drive.

So he put it in the car and drove 20 blocks and threw it out. When he got home, sure enough, there was the cat sitting in the driveway.

Desperate, he took the cat out of town and into a thick forest where he dumped it.

An hour later he phoned his wife. “Darling,” he said, “is the cat at home?” “Yes,” she said. “Why?” “Put it on the line,” he said. “I’m lost.”