The staff used to be flanked across the wall by the front doors. You bought your stuff and then steamed towards them, waiting in a line to take the next spare operator, like checking in at an airport.
You knew where you were with this system. I have been going to Whitcoulls since the end of the 19th century, and I have never seen this system malfunction.
Now you steam towards that same front wall and you crash into a rhinoceroserial square island, hammered into the middle of the floor by lunatics with no believable building plan or a shred of common sense.
If you are not looking where you are going - and I can't because I am nearly blind - you can have yourself a very serious accident. I have broken my leg twice, and the island has only been there seven weeks.
I know the Whitcoulls Human Resources people are drafting a reply as I write, how a focus group study found people prefer four-sided flexibility and the visual wonder of an island, how customers respond more excitedly to a square than a straight line.
Bollocks. The island is wholly dysfunctional.
Last Tuesday, I bought a plastic chair from the two-dollar store a couple of doors further north, and sat facing the island for two hours taking notes in a small red notebook. It was the most fascinating period of retail island-watching I have experienced this year.
It is chaos in there. The staff bang and crash against each other because nobody can see where anyone else is going. A frantic turn to answer a customer yelp from one of the four sides is impossible.
If more than one staff member decides to answer a request for attention, bodies crash into each like slam wrestling. And this was late March. Benign.
Imagine what it will be like in the last week before Christmas! Or on Boxing Day! If the new corporate muppets who own Whitcoulls are serious about making money, then they will install rows of seating right around the island for these peak retail days, so adults and children alike can be entertained, throwing money into the island as each riotously dangerous accident occurs.
This island discriminates severely against staff in two areas. First, the cash registers are placed beyond the reach of a short-armed person. My notes say there is at least one staff member in this category. OSH will have to be told.
And second, the new island means staff have to dress both their front and their back. Before, it was just the front, they could have any old thing on their back, even food from breakfast. Some great artists have celebrated only fronts - Michelangelo's Statue of David has a shocking back, and virtually no bum. Walk around it in Florence's Accademia Gallery, you will be very surprised.
Whitcoulls should not position themselves above Michelangelo. It's just not right.
Way way back, Whitcoulls was called Whitcombe and Tombs, and was down near the Exchange. They had an island. It was in the back half of the shop and had magazines all around it.
Going to pick up my weekly magazines from my own little cubbyhole was one of the most exciting things that happened to me at primary school, especially because I told my mother they cost more than what they did, and that left me with money for lollies. My mother would point out the prices in pencil were less than what she had given me.
"English prices, mother," I would reply nonchalantly through a mouth filled with half-chewed Buzz Bars.
That island was exciting. It wasn't in the way. The cash register could even be used by an armless person. We get it all oh, so very wrong these days.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
