“Do you want to try it?”<\/p>\n
I couldn’t believe my ears. My mother, who is at an age when people start to fear change, was inviting me to do something new.<\/p>\n
We were at a large supermarket in Pittsburgh, standing in front of 20 checkout counters<\/span>, four or five of which were staffed<\/span>. The lines<\/span> were fairly long, so she suggested we try the new automated checkout system<\/a> instead.<\/p>\n “Automated” is perhaps not the right word, since we had to do the work ourselves. We took each item out of our shopping cart and placed it on a scanner<\/span>, where a laser read its bar code<\/span>.<\/p>\n Next to the scanner were a couple of hooks<\/span> over which we placed a plastic bag. Each item went into the bag. So far, so good \u2014 except that the system weighed the bag to determine whether or not we were cheating<\/span>. Sometimes it didn’t notice that we had added something, and asked us to scan it again.<\/p>\n When we were ready to pay, the system wouldn’t recognize Mom’s credit card. After the third try, it called a human over to sort things out<\/span>.<\/p>\n We were not given a reward for doing someone else’s work<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It alarmed me to realize that people are now taking orders from robots; but what also bothered<\/span> me was that we were not given a reward<\/span> (other than the purely theoretical time savings) for doing someone else’s work.<\/p>\n I had been curious to try this system the same way I’d been curious when gas stations introduced self-service aisles<\/span> in the 1970s. You could save a dollar if you did the work of the gas-station attendant<\/span>, who used to be called a “service-station attendant<\/a>” because he’d clean your windows and check your oil while pumping your gas<\/span>.<\/p>\n Much of my life has been about trying to save a dollar, so I can understand that costs and prices have to be kept low. But what happened was that after a few years, all the aisles became self-service aisles, and all but<\/span> one of the attendants at each gas station lost their jobs.<\/p>\n This is about to happen to supermarkets, but I don’t want it to \u2014 particularly not in America, where they have one person to ring up<\/span> your groceries<\/span> and another to pack your bags. These days, I’m happy to pay someone to perform a service. Not only do you feel like a king; you’re helping people without skills to stay employed.<\/p>\n Think about it: if they’re out of work, they’re going to get your dollar or your euro anyway, through your taxes. Why not get something in return?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Do you want to try it?” I couldn’t believe my ears. My mother, who is at an age when people start to fear change, was inviting me to do something new. We were at a large supermarket in Pittsburgh, standing in front of 20 checkout counters, four or five of which were staffed. The lines were fairly long, so she … >><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[74,19,77,79,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=311"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1496,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/311\/revisions\/1496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fascinating-america.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}