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Brave new shopping

In my Italian class I noted the teacher had a lead from his laptop transferring the film to the big screen. I decided to acquire one and spoke to my tv guru, a most affable young man called Tom who bears startling similarity to my p/a Polly. Tom said this could readily be acquired from the Apple Shop and gave me its name: Thunderbolt.

The visit there filled me with disquiet. This was not because the staff are unfriendly – far from it- but the whole shopping experience is so alien to me. There are no tills, no obvious division between assistant and consumers. You arrive, wait and a person – usually with a woolly hat, piercings and tattoos – will assist you. I was quite specific, my only mistake was to confuse the name of the famous tv puppet show Thunderbirds with one of the great events of my life, the Israeli freeing of the hijacked in Entebbe   airport called Operation Thunderbolt.

The assistant looked at the display then his iPad and advised they were out of stock.

He went to another computer to see if they had a third party one.

After this he consulted with another assistant who looked up her computer. They returned to the display, could not find anything at first, but right in front of them and me was the cable.

Time in store 10 minutes. Time I could have been, had the cable been located right-away: 2 minutes. Sometimes the old ways are the best.

I will readily admit to being an impatient shopper. I like to be in and out with minimal queuing.

This reminds me of two true stories. One is of a colleague and friend at the Rust who woke up one morning and decided to buy a Porsche Boxster.

He went to the showroom and the member of staff had some difficulty as there was no element of salesmanship.

My pal merely wanted his Porsche as quickly as possible.

The second involves an Australian writer in San Francisco seeking to buy luggage at a store. At the time there was a lot of Australian credit card fraud so the transaction took ages to validate.

The writer, a chatty type, fell into conversation with the owner who said he would like to show him some memorabilia of a great man who saved his life and thousands of others.

If the card had been validated more quickly Thomas Keneally would never have written Schindler’s List.