At the airport this week, I did my customary stop at Hudson News to buy a snack and a drink, and sometimes a book or magazine. When I went to the counter to pay, I was asked if I was paying cash or card. Since I’m not one to carry cash, I said card. At that time, the clerk said I would have to go to the self-serve register.
Being me, I had to ask why she couldn’t ring me up. I wondered if the card reader was broken or something. She said cards have to go to the self-service area. A little surprised and a little invested in why, I asked a little incredulously that she really couldn’t ring me up?
At that time, one of her coworkers explained to me they really can’t ring someone up with a card at the full-service area. She said that the employees get into trouble if they have too many card transactions at the front area. Corporate actually pays attention to the sales per area and if the count is to high on card transactions, their boss will call them in as a reprimand for essentially, my words here, offering good customer service.
In full transparency, they are willing to walk over to the self-service area and help you ring things up. This is nice, but it also means for some corporate statistic, it gives the false impression that people don’t mind ringing themselves up. There are people who think nothing of doing so, but some of us don’t like doing it because we see the broader consequences in being our own cashier.
What is the broader consequence (well consequences) of being our own cashiers?
1) It actually can take longer as we fumble with finding the bar code, searching for the fruit or vegetable number, bagging our own purchases, before entering payment information.
2) It is increasing profits for corporations without a lowering for costs for us consumers (in fact, corporate greed recently has been proven to have increased recent inflation, but that is another story for another time). From a profit perspective, the more corporations can get consumers to do the work of a person themselves the more money to line their pocketbooks from the saved cost of wages even more, which Wall Street loves. We 99% don’t really see much, if any, benefit from the stock market, but the 1% definitely do.
3) Each set of six to 10 self-serve registers only employs one person to monitor for any issues that arise while one scans purchases oneself. This translates into the loss of at least two, sometimes more, jobs for someone in need of work. Often in retail it is teens, people with special needs, or retirees working as cashiers and baggers. Taking those positions away means there are more teens with nothing to do, meaning more may be out doing things that, shall we say, are less productive for society. Taking those positions away means the loss of dignity and sense of independence for people with special needs whose employment market is already severely limited. Taking these positions away from retirees can mean the difference between paying rent or helping with prescription costs causing a loss of dignity, independence, and increased health risks. The latter of which can help to increase health costs for us all.
Which leads to the fourth, and in some ways maybe the most egregious towards the long-term health of people and society as a whole. The loss of human connection.
For anyone who knows me, as I make no bones about it, I’m not a people person. I’d be perfectly happy alone on an island with plenty of books and garden space to fill my time. But, in reality, that isn’t entirely true. I, and believe me I hate to admit it, do need some human interaction. I get this from the handful of people I have let through most of my protective shell to become good and true friends (family is a bit of a given in this context).
I have no tolerance for nonsense and abhor small talk. I’m just not good with either as I see them as not a productive use of time. Let’s just get down to solving the ills of the world together or have a meaningful conversation about shared topics. But, as with all humans, I too am a social being, albeit less social than most. If I can talk to and see my inner circle here and there, I’m good for a long time.
For many though, if they don’t have anyone to interact with, superficially or meaningfully, they begin to whither away into a sense of nothingness. We know mental health issues are on the rise across all sectors of our society. People are lonely and we continue to take those moments of small interaction away.
We have gangs, militias, cults, lone shooters, high suicide rates, and more, because of this need to belong, to interact with another human being. Even when we know that joining may be detrimental to us in the long run, we still join because the thing we join makes us feel a part of something, and cared about by at least one person.
Think about it. In our recent past, the butcher knew us, the grocer knew us, the baker knew us, our local bar tenders knew us, and even the people at the corner five and dime knew us. Plus, most had family that lived next door, the next block, or nearby that saw one another all the time. We had some sort of connection to the people in our lives.
What does it look like nowadays. We order online without human interaction. We shop at the large stores and check ourselves out without human interaction. We go to a restaurant where more and more we order from a kiosk, then pay from the kiosk (at the time of ordering or at our table). We even now have to print our own boarding passes and put luggage tags on our bags at the airport. We pump our gas and pay for it at the pump.
In the not too distant past all of these tasks involved some type of human interaction, an acknowledgment of our existence. That for at least a short moment, someone saw us.
With the rise in self-fill-in-the-blank, what are we losing and at what cost? I’ll speak more to this in Part II next week.
Personal Reflections of a Middle-Aged Man 