And how do I know? It has passed Julian’s Tesco Checkout Girl Test (TCGT).
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Blogging has come of ageJanuary 20th, 2007 |
 31 comments to Blogging has come of age |
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I wrestle with a TESCO checkout to earn my money. Does it make you proud, Perry, that I read your blog? I hope so.
OK, Ok, I give in. As an American who’s been reading this blog for years, I have often wondered at the precise nature of this “Tesco.” I used to think it was a department store, but lately I’ve begun to think it’s a grocery store chain.
*sigh* Finally, I must bite the bullet, look like an idiot, and just ask– what is “Tesco”?
Laura: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesco
For me, TESCO is the only place nearby that’ll employ anyone at all in a comfortable job that pays above the minimum wage.
For most people, it’s the country’s biggest retailer. A decade ago, it only sold food items, but now it sells just about anything if you can find a big enough store or shop online. Their main focus is still on food, though.
Young females also use washing machines and dishwashers, phone their friends (and others) on mobiles, use desktop computers, play videos, DVDs, etc, and even drive cars (usually though, for females, only when of appropriate age). They have even been observed reading, and not just the Daily Mail.
I have some evidence that males can do all these things too, though not always so well; also, often, children and those of advanced age show a level of skill that can surprise some people.
In Beaconsfield M&S at least, I would not be surprised to find Proust and Neitzsche under the tills (which scares me).
On this, I know you mean well Perry, but does not Julian have a rather narrow view of what sort of person works where, and why? Also of females. Also of the extent to which blogging skills are more indicative of “higher intellect” than, for example, frequent TV appearence!
Best regards
I go by the Dad test.
Does that mean I hate my dad?
Shoe-shine boys was one traditional measure, proven equally as valid in 1987 as in 1929.
You’ve got to be careful though. In certain areas checkout chicks (and waitresses, and strippers, and …) have a high probability of being gradual students.
I have to admit the thought gradual students made me, not quite laugh, more snort in an appreciative way, out loud. 😀
One curious thing about Britain is that the largest retailer started out as a grocer and has steadily grown into a general retailer or discount department store (although it has also expanded the number of food only stores). In the US the largest retailer is Wal-Mart, which started out as a discount department store but in recent years has been selling more food, so although they were once completely different Tesco and Wal-Mart have been gradually becoming more like one another. One shouldn’t stretch the analogy too far – Tesco doesn’t emphasize low prices quite the way Wal-Mart does (although its non-food items in particular are usually very competitively prices), but it is interesting to watch.
Part of the reason for this is that British planning laws (boo, hiss) have made it difficult for discount department stores to come into being the way they did in the US (or Australia for that matters), so the food retailers became the most powerful parts of the retail sector in the UK. Tesco became masters of finding ways round the planning laws, so they have been better at building really big stores than anyone else.
Blogging mentioned on The Archers this week, too.
But US readers should note that Tesco is much more dominant in the UK than Walmart in the US: about twice the market share in groceries.
What a snobbish, out of touch name for a test. There’s something of the pompous, semi-educated person’s contempt for the ordinary working person about it.
And what a splendid example of Political Correctness your comment is Pete. Presumably we are supposed to pretend that girls working at Tesco are every bit as likely to be savvy technological early adopters as an IT/media sophisticates like Julian because to admit otherwise would be ‘snobbish’ (never mind if it is true or not).
Sorry, no sale. It is not contempt for ordinary working people, just a non-rose tinted honest view that ‘ordinary working people’ are very rarely the early adopers of technology and so when do adopt something, it has clearly become mainstream.
Julian is far from semi-educated and knows more about IT that 99% of the people I know, unless as a ‘Politicaly Correct’ person it is the ‘re-education camp’ sort of education you have in mind for people who dare to see the world differently to you.
For me the moment I knew blogging was destined for the mainstream was a couple years ago when a Los Angeles taxi driver started talking to me about blogging. I took that to mean blogging was leaving the Geek Ghetto.
Very true. When I was a university in the USA, quite a few of the strippers in the local strip joint were collage girls stripping their way through collage.
Indeed.
Don’t get me wrong: I applied for stripping work first, but they told me that the market wasn’t ready for what I, an ugly adolescent male, had to offer (although, not in those words).
And yes, as snobbish as it is to say, the TESCO checkout workers I know are not on the cutting edge of technology, science, or philosophy. But they are extremely friendly people who take a lot of abuse during the average day for just trying to do an honest job, so I’m not sure I even want to work anywhere else. Not that you were suggesting anything to the contrary.
To back Perry up, I’m pompous and semi-educated – if that – and I didn’t get any feeling of superiority out of it at all.
Sorry Perry, Julian makes an arse of himself with this.
His contempt for the checkout staff does him no favours.
Maybe Julian will really be happy if he hears of premiership footballers being clever enough to read, use the internet and even understand blogs. After all, it’s a known fact they are all as thick as planks.
By the way, why checkout girls at Tesco? At the stores near me the checkouts are staffed by people of both sexes and all ages from sixth former to OAP. Is it just the Tesco girls who are behind the times, or do all Tesco checkout staff live in the past?
Is ironic humor subject to either the TCGT, or the Collage Strippers Test (CST)?
Bloody hell, what a bunch of prissy people! I’ve got impeccable working class cred, but I thought Julian’s TCGT was spot on. If you think your typical checkout girl (and of course we’ve generalising here) isn’t a good indication of “has this reached the mainstream yet?” then I can only assume you don’t meet all that many working class people! Why pussy foot around the issue of class? It exists and that’s a fact. It’s also a fact the UK’s never been more socially mobile. I grew up in Sacriston, so I know a thing of two about class divides. These days I live a totally middle class lifestyle (it helps my wife makes a bloody fortune) but that’s not where I came from and it really makes me laugh that anyone would get the hump over such an innocuous article. I reread it twice to see where Julian was pissing on the checkout girls and I just can’t see it. He is marvelling on how clued up they were! I was an “early adopter” as Perry call it only because my better half is insanely in the know and she damn well forced me to use the internet (she’s Hong Kong Chinese and comes from a family of tech entrepreneurs). Most of my old mates from Country Durham probably know how to download porn off the web (that’s what its really for after all) but I’d be willing to bet that to a man they think MySpace is where you part your car.
Do you think those College strippers give lectures from Catherine MacKinnon books during the interval?
Heh, what a concept. I would guess that many ladies-of-the-pole are immune to such Marxist-variant drivel… the only one I knew personally was an engineering student and was probably the first member of the Libertarian Party I ever met in the flesh (so to speak).
I find the whole idea very disconcerting. If someone is better than me, I like to know it immediately. I don’t want to be lulled into a false sense of superiority by a poll-dancer, just to have it snatched from me when I see her walking through the carpark with her engineering textbooks. Damn this capitalism and its contempt for class-privilege.
Not to worry Ham, according to what Nikki (said lady’s name) told me, the strippers were about evenly split between collage girls stripping their way though uni and locals girls finacing their coke habits.
On second thoughts I am not sure if that will make you feel better.
I’ll be ok, so long as I have your assurance that it was not the way you financed your university education. I think I’ll just continue to stay well away from places where women remove their clothes and try to hypnotise me with their movement.
To leave this quite unedifying line of questioning for a moment, I feel, as a representative of the ‘TESCO Checkout Girl’ class, I have a responsibility to defend the blogger in question. I have observed that there is a strange sort of pride taken by society’s ignoble workers in not being involved in the pursuits of those in more gainful walks of life. Perhaps a stubborn attachment to intellectual self-sufficiency. From my narrow perspective, it would first require the elite to disown a certain practice (say, blogging) before those less exalted people choose to take an interest. People like to feel ownership of abstract ideas and hobbies, as well as physical property; people who are class conscious and ‘lower’ class – that is, people who define themselves as being ‘lower class’, which, of course, does not include every lower class person – seem to resist things are are ostensibly the property of the higher classes. So, I never blame a lack of intellect for the willful disinterest in new, clever things, because there are many other reasons for it, and I think the guy writing the article in question entirely intended to evoke them.
Rest assured, the cash flow was going in quite the opposite direction when I visited that establishment.
, writes Pete, on the subject of professional footballers.
Well, I have met half a dozen professional footballers, and they were all great guys, some quite web-savvy actually. But they were not early users of high-tech. They were too busy playing football.
I think you misread what Julian T. and Perry meant: they observed that it is rare for people who work in checkouts or somesuch to be early adopters of high-tech. unless it directly affects their jobs. Footballers are probably aware of the web because they increasingly have their personal ones to promote their careers, etc. But this was not even on their radar 10-15 years ago. That is a fact. Deal with it rather than spouting about the supposed snobbery of this blog’s contributors.
I prefer it when Tesco staff are actually doing their job and not nattering to each other whatever the subject might be.
I’ll be ok, so long as I have your assurance that it was not the way you financed your university education.
Why the discrimination?
Feh. So Blair’s Brave New Britain has thrown off its old class distinctions and is comfortable with a new egalitarianism? Don’t you believe it.
Neither Julian’s original post nor Perry’s re-posting here make any statements about class. Yet what’s the first thing that gets jumped on?
It’s about technology take-up. I’ve frequently seen the same process that Julian noted. I am an early adopter. I have been for years. And that means that when I tell my friends about the new stuff I’m excited about they usually either are bored or have no idea what I’m talking about.
Whether the test audience is Tesco checkout girls or the proverbial man on the Clapham omnibus, the point is the same. It’s about people who are not early adopters, not techno-geeks and who don’t get an attack of the vapours from the latest bit of gee-whizzery to come down the pike. When a technology has established itself to the extent that those people are not only aware of it but are interested in it, then the technology has come of age.
In short, it’s not about class, but interests.