Shopping in 2037; not like 1997

Every time I reread a little bit of Falling in order to write a post for this blog, it feels like I find another anachronism.

Consider the following passage;

At that moment there was an explosion of sparks from the till, the cash drawer thundering outwards, cracking violently against Jayde’s elbow. The top of the register popped open and the receipt roll catapulted out like a streamer thrown at a party. Jayde, her elbow badly fractured, stumbled backwards. The illuminated sign displaying the number of each checkout exploded, showering plastic across the air. And all over the store, several of the fluorescent tube ceiling lights popped like gunshots and shattered across the ground.

It occurs when Dale is shopping in a supermarket (Coles on the corner of Ramsgate Road and Grand Parade, Ramsgate, if you’re that interested). Until that point the supernatural disturbances in the story have only been in, on and around the Harbour Bridge, but he’s already had a nightmare – or what he hopes was one – where he perceives that the entity behind the phenomena entered into him.

So on the morning in question, when he’s minding his own business and going about his day, he sees awful things out in the street and inside when he goes to get his groceries.

Figuring he’s hallucinating, Dale tries to ignore it, but when the arms of phantoms, stripped of or covered in putrefying flesh, reach for him through the packets and bags of foodstuffs from the next aisles, it (naturally) gets too much.

When the paranormal visitation comes to a head and Dale experiences a maelstrom of wind and blood that may or may be in his mind, there are nevertheless electromagnetic effects throughout the rest of the store, as written above.

When I wrote those words some time in the early 1990s, supermarket checkouts had cash registers which produced the receipt from the top.

Even now (let alone in 2037), the checkout operator swipes the item across the scanner and even though they might have to put some information into the touchscreen in front of them, the money drawer opens somewhere else entirely and the receipt comes out somewhere else. Cash registers at major supermarket chains are a thing of the past.

As I’ve said before on this blog, even though Falling contains a lot of depictions of technology, I’ve tried to make the story fairly technology-agnostic in an attempt to give it a certain timelessness.

But am I doomed to continually notice devices, machinery and methods of doing things that history has proven are obsolete in the era I depict them happening? Will I have to update the book version every 10 years just because of the way we buy groceries?!?