It appears that Tesco have come up with an ingenious solution to the old conundrum of labelling the ‘express’ tills.  “10 items or less” is just wrong, but “10 items or fewer” sounds clumsy to many people so they have avoided the issue by saying “up to 10 items”.

Elegant you might think, and the Plain English Campaign would agree with you, but one person quoted in the comments has reservations: they are not clear whether this means 10 items is OK or does it mean 9 items or fewer?   Maybe it would have been better to have, as is suggested in the story itself, “not more than 10 items”.

On the other hand…  MAYBE IT DOESN’T MATTER AT ALL BECAUSE NOBODY PAYS ANY ATTENTION ANYWAY!  Well not in Broadfield’s Somerfield they don’t.  Either that or they think that “item” means “day’s worth of shopping”.  You go in and just want to buy a newspaper from the kiosk and find yourself behind half a dozen people with two packed baskets each all queueing for the single till (even though there can be three members of staff behind the counter its rare to have more than one till open).

You can’t blame them for not wanting to queue at the single normal till that is open and has a line of trolleys snaking away from it.   So you waste ten or fifteen minutes queueing to buy your newspaper, wondering why there are not more tills open before finally getting out to see the tables outside the cafe opposite are full of Somerfields staff having an extended fag break.

They can tinker with the language of the signage all they want but it won’t help.  It might be better in Tesco. I don’t know. Memories of Shirley Porter mean that Tesco is only ever a last resort forme.