Muzak

For someone who doesn’t particularly like shopping, I’ve always been able to put up with Lidl. The main reason for this is that they are ideally suited to bloke shopping – stock one of everything in a compact environment and arrange it in the no-nonsense style of “stuff-till-door”. I’m happy with that. The stock may change to take account of seasonal tastes but it is quite possible to fly in with a list, pick up all the essentials which will be in exactly the same place as last week, throw them past the checkout assistant at 90 mph (which is handy as that is the speed that the checkout works in a German supermarket) then head for the door like a demented whippet. If they don’t have any particular item in there is always the CO-OP across the road (and in fairness, they do much better coffee).

This arrangement of not-being-that-arsed-with-shopping has worked quite happily for me for a number of years. However, a few months back I found myself particularly irritated with Lidl. Initially, I thought this was because they were out of fish fingers and this would lead to the miserable task of trying to force feed the kids something healthy on Friday night. However, there were a few other things that were ticking me off: misplaced stock items, a lack of AA batteries, an empty box in the way of the fresh veg and so on. It wasn’t just me either. I could see the old Polish bloke grumbling about the sausages and someone was hacked off because the 4-ply bog roll wasn’t on offer that week. It then occurred to me what the cause of this general malcontent was: someone had chosen to put piped music into the otherwise pristine bloke-shop environment.

The big problem with this piped music was that it wasn’t even proper music. It was “sort-of” Jazz but not Jazz as I would typically enjoy. It was royalty free Jazz of the type that used to be played over the BBC test card. On enquiring further, I discovered that they also had royalty free rock, royalty free pop and royalty free ambient stuff (I think the proper term is “New Age” and it’s that thing they play in hippy alternative treatment quackeries). What made all this worse is that it was played very quietly so mere snippets of this annoyance drifted in and out of auditability with the simple aim disrupting one’s thought processes.

I don’t often contact businesses but I did feel compelled to contact Lidl about this affront to my auditory system. They said they were trying this out in a few shops (why in the name of God did they pick on Falkirk?) and were monitoring feedback. Now I can’t for the life of me think that anyone would have contacted them and told them what a singular improvement to their life this had made – I can only imagine that they would have received similar feedback to myself and other sonically offended individuals. However, after a few weeks this irritation seemed to disappear. Hooray! They do listen to people. Unfortunately, I was back in again yesterday and the music was back – possibly worse than ever and I was reliably informed by the disgruntled lad on the checkout that this cacophony of shite was also played in the staff room: that’s almost as bad as the poor guy in my brother-in-law’s local Sainsbury who was inflicted to the Christmas loop for the whole of last December (and much of November as well). Surely that comes under cruel and unusual punishments – is that even legal under health and safety legislation?

So I’m not sure what to do about Lidl and their bloody awful piped music. I think they may be trying to tell me something: shop at Aldi instead.