On the question of English identity, Reddit user Flewbs sums it up succinctly: “The north-south border is extremely well-defined. Just ask any northerner and they’ll gladly tell you that ‘the south’ is everywhere immediately below where they happen to live.”
For geographers, the Dorling line is the most widely accepted division between north and south. Named after a Sheffield University professor, it runs up from the mouth of the Severn estuary, below Birmingham and Sheffield, across to where the Humber joins the North Sea.
For the rest of us, the Pret/Greggs ratio, drawn up by researchers from Sheffield Hallam University to track the relative density of sandwich vs. steak bake outlets, may make more instinctive sense. Taken together, these two studies prove that there are many ways beyond geography to carve up the nation. (And that, for some reason, Sheffield has become the centre of the north/south definition industry.)
As a proud Scot living and working in the Midlands, the north/south divide is a subject that I approach without fear or favour. And, in the spirit of regional understanding, I’d like to propose a new way to tell the difference between north and south: their relative embrace of checkout technology.
Unexpected item in bagging area
In 2025, technology pervades almost every aspect of our lives. Wherever we look, roles previously held by people have been sucked up by chatbots, self-service screens, tablets and the remorseless rise of AI. Inevitably, this leads to an incredibly uniform experience. Whether you’re calling customer service, ordering a sandwich or doing your weekly shop, the prevalence of tech makes it all feel…well, boring.
Having fewer humans means fewer opportunities for joy. It also removes the opportunity for discretion: an incredibly important, and uniquely human, ability to break the rules in exceptional circumstances. So when I see headlines like: “Subway hits milestone of 400 digital kiosks across Europe”, I can’t help but feel that Subway’s customers are being robbed of precious human interaction.
More technology isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Tech can make things quicker and smarter, and save costs for business. It can also provide relief for customers whose worst nightmare is talking to strangers. However, things like self-service kiosks can often slow you down, have increased the rates of shoplifting in stores, and often make mistakes that require a staff member to come over and assist, meaning you have to talk to someone anyway.
When it works properly, you can go about your day without a hint of human interaction. Which sounds, does it not, like the perfect southern interaction?
He’s just a stereotype
As we all know, southerners are unfriendly and cold; unwilling to offer a “hello” or even a smile when passing in the street. Silent robot checkouts are their ideal. Northerners, in contrast, are prying and overbearing; sticking their noses where they don’t belong. They love nothing more than to hold everyone up with a long chat about nothing.
Of course, I’m generalising – I also know some incredibly grumpy northerners and many overbearing southerners – but there’s still some truth to these stereotypes. Politeness Theory distinguishes between positive and negative politeness cultures, which is why it’s rude to talk to a stranger on the London Underground and rude to ignore your fellow passengers at a Manchester bus stop. It makes sense that these cultures are revealed in their reaction to the technological revolution.
Because more and more people are beginning to realise that we might have gone slightly overboard in the robotisation of commerce and are seeking more of a middle ground. And when I say people, I mean more and more northerners. Retailers like ASDA (est. 1949, Knottingley, West Yorkshire) and Morrisons (est. 1899, Bradford, West Yorkshire) admitted things ‘went too far’, and have scaled back their number of self-checkouts, opting instead to reinstate more human cashiers.
Across the Pennines, Lancashire-based Booths (known in the trade as the Waitrose* of the north) has chosen to remove its self-checkouts almost entirely. And what happened to customer satisfaction?
According to MD Nigel Murray, it went up along with speed of service, while shoplifting decreased.
Away from the grocery sector, consider the quick-serve restaurant industry. All the big American brands are armed to the teeth with screens and tech. They’d seemingly rather eat their own eyeballs (cheese and toasted) than take a customer’s order.
Conversely, Greggs is the only QSR that can lay a hand to any of these in terms of market share and how many self-service kiosks does it have? Zero. And where is it based? Newcastle upon Tyne. QED.
The rise of the robots
This summer saw the first Wimbledon tournament without line judges.
Watching the finals, I got the feeling that we were witnessing what behavioural scientists call the doorman fallacy in action. For the uninitiated, the doorman fallacy explains why any reasonable cost-saving measure might fail due to a disregard for the unmeasurable.
To save money, a hotel replaces their doorman with an automatic door. The finance director is delighted, but now there is no one to move loiterers along, hail you a cab, or recognise returning guests. The hotel experience is diminished. The hotel closes. The finance director loses their job.
The introduction of automated “Hawkeye” line calling in tennis was intended to speed up play, while simultaneously reducing the number of errors. While, yes, the games may be quicker, and, yes, perhaps there are fewer errors being made – though they haven’t disappeared altogether, as Ms Pavlyuchenkova knows – the decision seems at odds with the essence of Wimbledon: the pageantry, the Pimm’s, the pomp and circumstance.
Those judges, with their immaculate uniforms and military precision, brought so much more to the experience of the event than just their line-calling.
And even if they did occasionally get something wrong, the drama that followed a challenged decision: the accelerando of applause, the athletes’ bated breath, the groans or cheers as the decision came up on the big screen, all added to the sense of occasion. Would the same decision to remove real umpires have been made if The Championships were held in Warrington, not Wimbledon? I’m not convinced.
(*Waitrose is, according to northerners, the Booths of the south).
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