Tesco has issued a response after a London woman’s petition to bring back till staff at the supermarket has surpassed 110,000 signatures.
Pat McCarthy, from Brentford in West London, began her campaign after visiting the Tesco Extra in Osterley, where she said 75 per cent of the tills were self-service.
“My local Tesco has inaccessible self-service tills with no staff which makes the shopping experience physically difficult and overwhelming,” McCarthy wrote in her Change.org petition.
“These new tills are not accessible for people who don’t have credit cards and can only use cash or those with little confidence to use these self-service card-only tills - myself included. People such as carers, older people, disabled people with mobility problems or lifting problems have to queue waiting [for the in-person tills] for more than 30 minutes.”
McCarthy added that the new self-service tills have displaced “mainly part-time women staff”.
“I love chatting with the staff, albeit briefly, especially as l live on my own. Talking with human staff is important to me. Now that experience has been taken away from me,” McCarthy continued.
She explained that the self service tills are a “physically taxing process” and “as an older woman”, she is unable to lift anything heavy.
McCarthy would like to meet with Tesco CEO Ken Murphy for a discussion and to ask about his self-service till policy.
“I want Ken Murphy to bring staff back to do check-outs on the till and not have a ‘replace people with machines policy’,” McCarthy wrote.
“If we lose, it means an erosion of a great shopping experience into a Tesco’s shopping nightmare.”
A Tesco spokesperson said: “Our colleagues and the friendly service they provide are absolutely vital to our stores and will always be on hand to help our customers, whether they are checking out at one of our colleague-operated or self-service checkouts. We first introduced self-service checkouts nearly 20 years ago to give our customers a choice and our stores have both types of checkout.”
