Tesco facing furious shopper boycott over 'nightmare' checkouts being installed in supermarkets

Supermarket giant Tesco has found itself in hot water with shoppers over its self-checkouts.

A 69-year-old woman called Pat McCarthy started a petition to bring back more Tesco cashiers to tills instead of opening up self-checkouts. To date, the petition has been signed more than 106,000 times, and it's also started a heated argument on Twitter.

Pat, who's from Brentford in West London, says she started the petition because three-quarters of the tills in her local store are now self-service, and she's not a happy bunny about it. Writing on her change.org page, she said: "My name is Pat, I am 69 years old, and retired but I am a volunteer helping disabled people with applying for Personal Independence Payment (PIP) forms and a Trustee of my local Disability Network.

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"My local Tesco has inaccessible self-service tills with no staff which makes the shopping experience physically difficult and overwhelming. At my local Tesco mega-store, and probably all over the country, Tesco is bringing in new self-service and sort-it-yourself card only till machines. They make up 3/4 of the tills now.

"These new tills are not accessible for people who don't have credit cards and can only use cash or those with little confidence to use these self-service card-only tills - myself included. People such as carers, older people, disabled people with mobility problems or lifting problems have to queue waiting for more than 30 minutes.

"I couldn't lift the windscreen wash the other day in Tesco because it was so heavy and some men were lovely to help and had to put it in my car for me. If they weren’t around and my daughter wasn’t with me, I would have been helpless.

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