Sainsbury’s is stepping up surveillance on its self-checkout tills. It’s hard not to laugh out loud. Not only will shoppers in some stores be recorded close-up by a VAR-style camera as they pack their groceries, but should anything appear amiss they may be shown a replay bearing the message: ‘Looks like that last item didn’t scan. Please check you scanned it correctly before continuing’. It doesn’t get much more Big Brother than that.
Britain is rapidly becoming a surveillance society. Banks of cameras are part of the furniture on our streets, and in our supermarkets and shops. Some stores even use facial recognition. As I wrote in The Spectator a year ago, this obsession with surveillance and automation is part of the reason why I no longer shop at Sainsbury’s.
Sainsbury’s and other supermarket bosses are missing something fundamental about their customers
Sainsbury’s and other supermarket bosses are missing something fundamental about their customers which can be summed up very simply: we’re human! And, as humans, we don’t like to be watched, scrutinised and surveilled.
Given their undiminished enthusiasm for finding new ways to monitor us, it appears that Sainsbury’s managers don’t understand this. Think about how you feel when someone stands over you and watches as you try to execute some tricky practical task. At some point, you’re likely to intimate they’re making you nervous.
‘It’s rude to stare’, our elders told us as children, conveying to newer entrants to the species the fact that people tend to feel uncomfortable when subjected to close inspection. It doesn’t matter whether the stare is the fruit of innocent curiosity or loaded with predatory intent; it can still make us feel uncomfortable.
The television programme Big Brother fascinates us because a group of humans willingly put themselves in a position where they are under continual surveillance. How can they bear it, the rest of us ask.
These are the kinds of examples I would use if it turned out that Sainsbury’s or other supermarket bosses were visitors from another planet. In any case, life on earth is full of examples of how surveillance has been used to militate against human flourishing.
The use of surveillance is central to authoritarian regimes, both to how they maintain their power and the lasting damage they inflict on their populations. In Stasiland, Anna Funder interviewed one of the key figures in the system set up to spy on the citizens of the German Democratic Republic. The conversation revealed that those under ‘Operational Control’ were enemies – but an enemy was defined as someone who was under ‘Operational Control’. A circular logic – hear my dark laughter at human absurdity – which demonstrates the antagonistic attitude at the heart of the will-to-surveil.
In 2019, I spent some time in Albania, the country that languished under communist dictatorship for nearly half a century, doing research for a book which ended up as Spyless in Tirana. Decades on, the cameras and recording devices in the museum which used to serve as the secret police headquarters didn’t look up to much. But the Hoxha regime had other means by which to maintain control: by the 1980s, as many as one in three people in the capital worked for the secret police, creating a comprehensive system of surveillance in which neighbours and family members informed on each other.
The poverty and under-development of Albania thirty years after the collapse of the regime were obvious to me. But I was puzzled by the behaviour of some of the Albanians I got to know; there was a guardedness and often an indirect way of talking. Then Ana Stakaj, women’s programme manager for the Mary Ward Loreto Foundation, explained the psychological effects of surveillance and it started to make sense.
‘Fear, and poverty and isolation closed the mind, causing it to go in a circle and malfunction,’ she told me. ‘In communism, people were forced even to spy on their brother, and the wife on their husband. So they learned to keep things private and secret, especially thoughts: your thoughts are always secret.’
Like the other authoritarian experiments of the last century, Albania illustrates the corrosiveness of surveillance and how it creates a society permeated by distrust. I wonder whether we’ve learnt the lessons offered by the authoritarian regimes of the last century: or the living lesson provided by China’s techno-authoritarianism. Do we really understand where using all this new technology so freely is taking us?
In twenty-first century Britain, where police and Prime Minister want ubiquitous facial recognition, where AI cameras are being used to monitor drivers inside their cars – and where cameras record your every move in the supermarket – we’re increasingly living our daily lives under surveillance.
Supermarket bosses cite shoplifting as the reason for increasing the infrastructure of surveillance. Police recorded 516,971 shoplifting offences in 2024, a 20 per cent increase on the 429,873 offences in 2023 and the highest since record-keeping practices began in 2003, according to the Office for National Statistics. The rise correlates not just with the hike in food prices that followed Covid, but also with the replacement of staffed checkouts by self-service machines.
A while ago, I walked around the bank of self-checkouts in a John Lewis food hall to be served by one of the two remaining cashiers. It was nice being served by a human, I told him. He reciprocated with the confidence that theft had risen hugely since managers had replaced people with machines. So here’s a suggestion for supermarket bosses: instead of upping the surveillance, just bring back the humans.
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