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Helping yourself
This is not one of my pseudopsychological journeys, but a glimpse into the end of the world as we know it. Follow me.
It all started with self-serve gas stations. Cheap people like me would pound on our gloves, zip up our winter coats, and stand in the screaming wind and blowing snow to save 10¢ per litre. Rich people would pull up in their Audis or BMWs, roll their window down a crack, place their order to a frozen gas attendant, and listen to classical music (which I think rich people do) and keep their interior heaters cranked. They would slip their credit cards through the aforementioned window crack and wait for the frozen attendant to return.
So there’s two ways to do it. Pay for service and be comfortable, or save money by doing it yourself. Stay with me.
Great advances in technology now allow you to pay at the pump, unless the pump doesn’t like you. And it doesn’t. The pump—not a human—can now ask you a series of questions. You are unaware of these questions, as you are just trying to pump gas into your car, and nothing is happening. The pump is asking whether you have a points card. I tell the pump, “I just want @#$%ing gas in my car.” It does not understand. So I poke its buttons until it tells me to select a grade, lift the nozzle, and insert it into the filler hole. Since I did this five minutes ago, in a crazy attempt to gas up, I was on my way, until I found out it took my credit card, but I removed it at the wrong time so, ‘Please pay inside’.
This is not all about gas, but I get mine in Tyendinaga. I go all the way to the top to Speedway Gas, because they have a whole team of actual humans. No worries, no frustration. I pay 1¢ per litre more than surrounding stations, but any business who hires a team of genuine people, and pays them, gets my money. Now let’s talk about progress.
PROGRESS?
Ever since The Jetsons appeared on TV, everyone has been enamoured with technology. (Actually Buck Rogers was first, but we can’t blame him.) Back then, asking for a cheeseburger into a speakerphone and having it suddenly appear would have been mindblowing. Commonplace now.
But tech can be a curse as well as a blessing. Corporations are now finding they can make checkout machines do their dirtywork. This is because 1) They can reduce the trouble of having ‘employees’, who need troublesome ‘paychecks’, and 2) They can make us do the work.
I’ve used these machines, because most of my purchases are small, and I can beat the line-ups. In Dollarama, the machine constantly scolds me because it detects ‘Unexpected item in the bagging area’. I no longer use the bagging area, but still get the message. If the machine gives me trouble, there’s no human to be found, probably because they’re setting up their multiple rows of Christmas decorations in August.
THINK THIS THROUGH
I want to buy a bag of milk. At Foodland, it’s credit card only, so I go to Metro. I use the machine because I have one item, easy to scan, and I scan it and set it on the floor, because of the ‘bagging area’ thing.
In both places, there is an employee watching, to make sure you don’t scan a chocolate bar, and bag 25 frozen lobsters. They are also there to help technodumb people like me who are desperately trying to scan the butt off a six-pack of eggs, but it just ain’t happening. Swipe, swipe, curse, swipe, curse some more, and they come to help. They can’t scan it either, but they don’t curse. Instead, they magically enter the bar code, and everything is good. Just like a human teller would do.
Once I wanted to buy an onion, because I needed an onion. I looked at the machine, and pictured the horrible scenario that would follow. Onions don’t have bar codes, because they are onions, and tend to shred their bar codes every spring. How would it know what kind of onion I had? How could I weigh it? I saw, “Unexpected onion in the bagging area,” in my future and left. I went to No Frills, and she asked, “Sweet or Spanish?” I said, “Sweet.” Done. Sometimes they don’t even ask, because they are humans, and they learn stuff about onions.
Do you get it yet? That’s the advantage of having humans. Humans know stuff. Would it not be better to have the machine-monitoring human posted to a checkout, to speed things up, so people with a bag of milk and six eggs could just motor through?
And whatever happened to the Express Lane. Eight items or less—bing, bang, boom, out the door. Unless someone had a coupon. To me, this is throwing away efficiency and replacing it with that gas station ‘selfserve’ mentality.
PONDER THIS …
I have a Zoom meeting with my family every Sunday. It won’t surprise you they are as weird as me. This topic came up, and we explored it. Here’s the basic thought process:
We are now doing the work that employees were originally hired to do, i.e. tally up our purchases, collect cash, credit or debit in payment. Next.
Now that the machines are in, they are not doing the work. We are doing the work. We scan it; we bag it; we pay for it. Basically, we are doing the work of grocery store employees.
Do we get paid for this? It seems that, if we are doing the work of their employees, we should be receiving a wage for our efforts.
Say, for example, a checkout person makes $20 an hour, and it took me 15 minutes to run my purchases through the self-checkout, that should entitle me to a $5 rebate, in return for the work I did for the store.
If you think about it, they are using our time for free, and they are not paying for it. People who do the work deserve to be paid.
A BUCK ROGERS FUTURE
Yes, we can have it. Flying cars are in their prototype phase. God help us, because we don’t know how to run ground vehicles that well.
Progress is built into our psyche. We always want more and better. But it’s not always better. We love that we can tap our cards on a machine, and it knows us, and recognizes us, and allows us to buy an onion.
I’m not sure this is a good thing. Progress means: “I want to buy an onion, and I want to pay cash.”
“Cash? I’m sorry sir, but what is that? Perhaps you should use our totally friendly machine, which accepts credit cards for your onion purchase. It will thank you in a mildly friendly robotic voice for your purchase.”
To me, I picture a future grocery store with no humans, and I’m holding up an onion and shouting, “I just want to buy an onion! Is there anyone here? Anyone?”
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