A call on supermarkets locally to provide both staffed and self-service tills without having to be asked

• COUNCILLOR Richard Cotton wrote a few weeks back about the problems of a supermarket, in this instance Sainsbury’s, where staffed tills have vanished; for many people, elderly, disabled, people doing the weekly shop, juggling children or buggies or other shopping, they present insurmountable difficulties.

People are turning away to somewhere else where they find service and a human being to interact with. Apart from the difficulties, it might be the only person someone talks to of a week, when they go shopping.

You’re told that you can ask to have a till staffed; that’s both embarrassing and awkward, and depends on finding a member of staff with the time to staff that till.

Last weekend Booths, a supermarket based in the north of England, announced its decision to return to staffed tills, in order to give better customer service, in fact to provide high levels of warm, personal care.

They have found machines to be “slow, unreliable and impersonal”, probably because the users are not trained till professionals. It is also a response to an epidemic of shoplifting. If you engage with someone, make eye contact, it is known, they are less likely to walk off with your goods!

We, the undersigned, call on supermarkets locally to provide both staffed and self-service tills without having to be asked – to provide the mix of service a mix of people want and need; some love self-serve shopping, others don’t.

CAMDEN COUNCILLORS LARRAINE REVAH, RICHARD COTTON, JUDY DIXEY, ANNA BURRAGE, GIO SPINELLA, JONATHAN SIMPSON, LORNA GREENWOOD, DANNY BEALES, SAGAL ABDI-WALI, LINDA CHUNG, KEMI ATOLAGBE, HEATHER JOHNSON, RICHARD OLSZEWSKI, MATTHEW KIRK, JENNY HEADLAM-WELLS, SYLVIA MCNAMARA, SHAH MIAH, ANNA WRIGHT, SUE VINCENT, LOTIS BAUTISTA, NANOUCHE UMEADI, PAT CALLAGHAN, LLOYD HATTON, MATT COOPER, TOM SIMON, NANCY JIRIRA, REBECCA FILER, ADAM HARRISON, MERIC APAK.