Tap, Grab, Bankrupt: The Lunacy of Everton’s ThroughPass

Everton's new Hill Dickinson Stadium (Photo credit to The BBC)

Everton Football Club have pre-announced their bankruptcy, following the launch of their ThroughPass service, a self-service food stall, in a move experts have called "ground-breaking lunacy".

ThroughPass will enable any hungry Evertonians the opportunity to skip the queues and public interaction required with a traditional food kiosk, as well as offering any local thieves or chancers the opportunity to get a full meal for free. Toffees are asked to tap their card via contactless and walk forward into a small canteen area, where hot food, snacks and pints are clearly laid out. Here, they simply pick up whatever they want and walk out, with the system automatically detecting how much to charge the card provided.

It's pretty clear that this system has been thought up by someone who has never been to a game of football and has never met your average football fan. The first person foolish enough to tap their card against the machine will witness a ransacking akin to the fall of Rome, hordes of hungry hooligans grabbing every pie and pint they can get their hands on, with all of it being charged back to that regretful 'tapper'. If you want to eat guilt-free at the new Goodison, best hope your overdraft runs as deep as former gaffer Sean Dyche’s voice.

As a decision for the club, one must ask why they would feel the need to do this? Surely, the risk of thievery outweighs the supposed benefit of quicker queues? Even in this imagined utopia, you would still need to queue!

Beyond the comedy of it all, we must also remember that this system is also replacing someone's job. As much as the constant expansion of self-service machines at supermarkets is supposed to make 'checkout-time more efficient', the truth is far simpler: it's cheaper than paying staff. Mega-corporations and big businesses, football clubs included, will spend an eye-watering amount of money to create a system that saves them a wage. These systems increase customers' annoyance, create an over-reliance on technology and damage the working class. A new stadium like the Hill Dickinson should create opportunities and wealth for the surrounding area. Instead, they've taken it as a chance to automate and leave those workers behind.

If the club want a genuine legacy in their new home, they’d be better off investing in people, not machines. After all, no amount of contactless gimmicks will ever replace the human connection of buying a pie from someone who knows your face, your order, and maybe even your mood after the final whistle.