CELPIP Reading Part 4 Practice Test: Self-Checkout Lanes at Brockfield Grocery Stores Debate

For years, the checkout area at Harvest Basket on Wellington Road resembled any other grocer’s: eight lanes, each with a cashier. Last spring, self-service machines replaced six of them. Brockfield councillors are now debating a bylaw obliging every grocery store exceeding 1,500 square metres to keep at least two staffed checkouts open throughout its business hours.

Councillor Denise Kowalczyk, its drafter, disclaims any ambition to turn back the clock; she uses the machines herself for a carton of milk. “But groceries aren’t an optional service,” she contends, “and an elderly cash customer abandoned in a twenty-minute queue, or retreating home empty-handed, represents a problem the whole community owns.” Dozens of complaints reached her office following the change, predominantly from residents over seventy.

Arjun Mehra, the franchise owner, dismisses the bylaw as a solution in search of a problem. “Automation enabled me to remain open until eleven without raising prices,” he explains; his payroll has not shrunk, and the online orders now consuming his staff’s shifts were scarcely possible before. Queues at the staffed lane, he concedes, initially ran “longer than they should have been,” hence a second weekend cashier, though he bristles at the notion that legislation was needed to prompt it.

Retail consultant Hélène Gagnon, an adviser to several grocery chains, suspects the controversy may resolve itself. Numerous large North American retailers have scaled back self-checkouts, she notes; what a machine saves in wages, it may give back in goods reaching the parking lot unscanned, whether through carelessness or intent. A bylaw, in her view, would entrench a rule just as stores begin rebalancing voluntarily, although the correction “won’t happen overnight, and some shoppers can’t wait.”

Walter Byrne, 81, who drives a volunteer van for the seniors’ centre, taps through the screens without difficulty. His weekly passengers are another matter: some, with poor eyesight or stiff hands, find them bewildering and are too embarrassed to request assistance. What they crave, he maintains, is “a person who will look them in the eye,” and if legislation alone can guarantee that, he will reluctantly endorse it.

I lost a till job to these machines after eleven years, which gave me a particular interest in this article. I have no wish to return to those tills. The franchise owner deserves some credit: unlike many owners, he 6. Choose…kept his displaced staff onkept his prices steadyadded a second weekend cashierstayed open later than his rivals.

I still cannot accept that the bylaw is superfluous. Those complaints came mostly from 7. Choose…shoppers paying with cashpassengers in volunteer vanslate-evening customersresidents past seventy, so dozens of calls signify more than they might from anyone else.

The consultant may be correct that the machines won’t 8. Choose…shorten the queuesdeliver the promised economiesappeal to older customerssurvive in larger chains. Her own caveat undercuts her, however: the correction 9. Choose…depends on municipal pressuremay never reach smaller grocerswill take a whilehas barely registered with retailers. What struck me most was the volunteer driver’s remark. A guaranteed staffed till would offer his passengers 10. Choose…a person to deal witha chance to pay in casha shorter wait in the linehelp with reading the screens, and councillors should approve it.