Nothing unites Edinburgh residents like the pure, unadulterated horror of Newington Lidl at rush hour. If you happen to step through those sliding doors between 4:30 to 6:30pm on a weekday—or any given day, really—you inevitably lose fifteen minutes to the queue, or succumb to spending an extra £3 on Taste the Difference products at Sainsbury’s next door. Trivial consequences, maybe, but if you (like me) are a Lidl loyalist, it adds up all too quickly.
It is this, the peak time peril we’ve come to take for granted, that the renovation promises to change. In the interest of investigative journalism (and in need of a Lidl bakery pain au chocolat), I visited the facelifted Newington branch in time for the 5:30pm rush last week.
The obvious change is the replacement of the two traditional tills with another row of self-checkout machines, and the effect is immediate. Gone are the days of searching for the end of the queue that had snaked around the frozen section, into the drinks aisle, and somehow doubled back on itself. Naturally there was still a queue—to get rid of it entirely in a location with footfall as high as Nicolson Street would be a Herculean task—but the wait time was now only a matter of seconds.
With no traditional tills left, however, staff have the added task of individually directing cash-paying customers to the correct machines. Even pre-renovation, the machines could never correctly detect the weight of my tomatoes; now, staff spend far more time dealing with sporadic malfunctions, signalling an issue that goes beyond the optics of supermarket tills.
The renovation does maximise the number of customers moving in and out as quickly as possible, but—without veering too far into anti-capitalist critique—this need for constant efficiency and profit has come to govern the increasingly transactional nature of our everyday lives. Self-checkouts at supermarkets, self-ordering machines at restaurants, self-scanners at retail outlets: the common denominator is the removal of the other person involved in the process.
It’s not universal, nor are the consequences too drastic, thus far—but more and more of these commonplace interactions are becoming a solitary affair in the name of convenience. The extra minute or two of small talk with cashiers at regular tills, that brief human connection, has all but vanished amid growing automation.
Still, nothing could really make shopping at Lidl a relaxing experience (that’s what Margiotta is for). At least the renovation has marginally improved the rush hour headache – but that dreaded queue, and the unspoken solidarity between everyone in it, will always be intrinsic to the Edinburgh experience.
Photo by Will Lander for The Student
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The Newington Lidl Renovation and the Politics of Human Interaction
Nothing unites Edinburgh residents like the pure, unadulterated horror of Newington Lidl at rush hour. If you happen to step through those sliding doors between 4:30 to 6:30pm on a weekday—or any given day, really—you inevitably lose fifteen minutes to the queue, or succumb to spending an extra £3 on Taste the Difference products at Sainsbury’s next door. Trivial consequences, maybe, but if you (like me) are a Lidl loyalist, it adds up all too quickly.
It is this, the peak time peril we’ve come to take for granted, that the renovation promises to change. In the interest of investigative journalism (and in need of a Lidl bakery pain au chocolat), I visited the facelifted Newington branch in time for the 5:30pm rush last week.
The obvious change is the replacement of the two traditional tills with another row of self-checkout machines, and the effect is immediate. Gone are the days of searching for the end of the queue that had snaked around the frozen section, into the drinks aisle, and somehow doubled back on itself. Naturally there was still a queue—to get rid of it entirely in a location with footfall as high as Nicolson Street would be a Herculean task—but the wait time was now only a matter of seconds.
With no traditional tills left, however, staff have the added task of individually directing cash-paying customers to the correct machines. Even pre-renovation, the machines could never correctly detect the weight of my tomatoes; now, staff spend far more time dealing with sporadic malfunctions, signalling an issue that goes beyond the optics of supermarket tills.
The renovation does maximise the number of customers moving in and out as quickly as possible, but—without veering too far into anti-capitalist critique—this need for constant efficiency and profit has come to govern the increasingly transactional nature of our everyday lives. Self-checkouts at supermarkets, self-ordering machines at restaurants, self-scanners at retail outlets: the common denominator is the removal of the other person involved in the process.
It’s not universal, nor are the consequences too drastic, thus far—but more and more of these commonplace interactions are becoming a solitary affair in the name of convenience. The extra minute or two of small talk with cashiers at regular tills, that brief human connection, has all but vanished amid growing automation.
Still, nothing could really make shopping at Lidl a relaxing experience (that’s what Margiotta is for). At least the renovation has marginally improved the rush hour headache – but that dreaded queue, and the unspoken solidarity between everyone in it, will always be intrinsic to the Edinburgh experience.
Photo by Will Lander for The Student
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