Slaves To The Machine

The continuing saga of the UK retail cyber attacks, in particular the M&S one, which has seen a £750mn hit to its share price since it had to go offline to sales, was touched on in a piece by Claer Barrett in this weekend's FT, highlighting not just the knock-on effects of the attack on its investors' responses, but also the potential future effects on its brand and the loyalties of its customer base. As she rightly points out, the brand's demographic base is people in the middle to upper age bracket, who are probably somewhat less fickle and volatile in their shopping habits than younger age groupings.

But the company's somewhat tardy response to the event and in getting their systems back in order reflects a kind of 'late-to-the-party' approach in engaging in twenty-first century retail practice in the first place. The relatively poor take-up and management of their loyalty card, and also only relatively recent deployment of self-service checkouts that are also not of the first order of usability, suggests that maybe both the company and its customer base were probably quite happy with the old order of things, anyway. It would also suggest that we have been somnabulating towards a technological cliff-edge for some time [blog posts passim], with far too much reliance on snake oil salesmen [and they usually are men], selling retailers nostrums that allegedly cure ailments that didn't exist in the first place.

Case in point: when I was a salesman in a photographic retailers - admittedly back in the Stone Age - our till [if you are under fifty, just Google cash register], was like all in those days, only connected to the electricity supply that powered it. Data network was there none. It stood alone to serve its sole purpose of processing the day's [mostly cash] transactions. Credit card sales were processed mechanically with a crude voucher-impressing device, and on larger card sales, with a telephone call to the card issuer as backup. As to calculating the individual transaction tally and the value of any change required, that was done by us; either in our heads or on a piece of paper, within usually a maximum of thirty seconds; most often, much less.

Fast forward to the present day, and our usual small, once or twice-weekly lunches at the Bull, which always amount to the same five items: always the same five items, with total price varying only by whatever ale is on sale on the day; but which takes even the most adept finger-tapping touchscreen operative a minimum of forty-five seconds to a minute of frantic finger-prodding activity to input into the system and tell the staff member how much payment is required. That's one Americano with hot milk, one pint of Bass or whatever else is on; two portions of chips and a bowl of soup. Not exactly 'War and Peace' or 'À la Recherche du Temps Perdu', is it? For the most part, they don't even have to deal with change, as most of us since Covid pay electronically [and given the cyber attacks mentioned above, therein lie dragons and demons in abundance]. To be honest, if this is considered progress, I really don't know what to say...