Argos-nauting

Argos-nauting in Holloway

If you are not a regular (once every few years), a visit to Argos is disconcerting. Argos’s premises make no concession to presentation. They are basically sheds, divided into two areas. At the back they are warehouses where the goods are stored. At the front, they have the feel of of a shabby airport passport area. Concrete floors; queues which perplex (which one to join?); friendly but firm employees ministering to your uncertainties and finally letting you go.

It used to be fairly simple. Look up the paper catalogue. Fill out a docket. Queue. Hand docket in and pay. Wait. Get called forward. Grab and go.

Now, technology has curiously complicated the process. You can still take the old route. Otherwise, there are banks of terminals – resembling a call centre without seats. You are supposed to find your purchase online. But you can’t pay or communicate with the back-shed through the terminal. You have either to memorise the product ID number or create a “memorable information” word. Then you go to another terminal fixed to the wall like a ticket machine (which in fact it is).

You tap in your ID or memorabile, and up comes, you hope, your item. You are prompted to insert your card into a reader. This is now all familiar stuff. But still no communication with the back-shed.

Instead, the “ticket” machine issues you with – a ticket, or docket. All that technology has brought to the same place as the traditional catalogue-and-pencil methods of yesteryear. (Except you have now paid.)

Gripping your docket, you approach the Border between catalogue area and warehouse. Technology the Argos way has not yet finished with you. You can’t just hand in your docket and collect. The problem is that the warehouse people (1) still don’t know what you’ve purchased, in spite of all the terminals and (2) can’t keep up with the fetching and carrying once they do know.

There’s got to be another queue. This is, inevitably, managed electronically (an upgrade from the paper ticket queuing you get in some shops and hospitals). In return for your paper-but-issued-by a terminal-docket, you get handed a chunky piece of bleeping kit, which then settles into dormant mode.

You are told that when it re-bleeps, then you are the Chosen.

Bleep. Phew. Holloway Road.

June 2015