A personal account describing an encounter with a Retail Assistance Unit during the 1978 automation trials.
STATEMENT (SUBMITTED 2025)
The following recollection was submitted to the PRTV Community Input scheme by a former Peterlee resident. Names have been withheld at the contributor’s request.
Recollection
“I must have been about ten or eleven. Mam used to take me to Presto on a Saturday morning – the one near the bus station, not the little market shop.
I remember one week there was this… thing. A little machine, about the height of my chest, with a square front and a blinking band of lights. It moved between the aisles like it knew where it was going.
Mam said it was ‘one of them new helpers’ they were trying out. She told me not to get in its way.
What I remember most is the noise: a soft beeping whenever someone stopped near it, and a kind of whirring when it turned. It didn’t speak, but it had a panel with pictures on it – tins, bread, milk – and if you pressed one it would shuffle away, like it was thinking about something.
I pressed the picture of biscuits. It paused, spun halfway, then led me down the aisle. Mam didn’t like that – said it shouldn’t be taking kids anywhere – but I thought it was brilliant.
I saw it once more a few weeks later. Then never again.”
PRTV NOTES
The described device closely matches the Retail Assistance Unit (RAU) – Mark II, deployed in limited trials in 1978 across the Town Centre precinct.
Presto Superstore (Castle Dene Centre) is listed in Technical Services documents as one of three commercial partners participating in the automation trials.
Trial reports from the same period mention:
children “testing” RAU response panels,
RAUs hesitating in crowded aisles,
concerns from store managers about unsupervised public interaction.
This recollection provides valuable insight into public perception during the early rollout of retail automation technologies.
STATUS
Filed as part of the Community Input collection for Oral Histories & Resident Accounts.
If you’d like to contribute your own recollection relating to automation, the Science Centre, or Peterlee’s technological schemes, please see the Participate page.
