The checkstand

One of my friends posted a Facebook comment recently in which she celebrated the Albertsons food chain’s decision to remove self-checkout from its front end service mix. Several of us cheered the news and it got me to thinking.

It’s been presumed since the dawn of the industrial age that the phrase “does the work of x humans” signaled a step forward. In one important way, that has proved true. The ability to put some of the most menial, repetitive work onto the backs of machines freed humans to specialize, which in turn fostered our ability to provide more than just the basics of food and shelter. Specialization is a good thing. I get that.

But the more we specialized, the fewer hands we had available to do the everyday work of providing for our own subsistence and the more we were encouraged to find ways to supplant human labor with more efficient equipment and methods. In order to make best use of machines, we needed to standardize parts and processes. And the more we did that, the easier it became to design machines to make more and more of the parts and the fewer humans were needed and…so it went. Machines and standardization are co-dependent, so to speak.

The trouble is that we’ve reached the point at which the balance between the need for efficiency and human needs has been upset. Or more accurately, the balance between competing human needs has gone all catawampus. We need to be able to produce enough of everything to fill everyone’s needs. But we also need to be able to distribute those things equitably.

The whole point of banding together into family groups, tribes, regional and eventually national entities was to provide a framework within which people could provide for themselves and each other. By massing together we could more efficiently deploy our resources and even allow for specialties and sub-specialties that could never have existed when each family unit was primarily concerned with provision of rudimentary shelter, food and self-protection.

I understand the profit motive and typically, machines cost less to operate than do human employees. But it’s not about the machines, is it? Isn’t it still and always about the people?

Ultimately, I can’t say that store clerks are the right place to draw the line. I can say that I don’t necessarily find self-checkout more convenient and I certainly don’t find it more pleasurable.  I enjoy the banter in the checkout lane and I like that the person behind the POS machine knows the answer to all the what-ifs.

I could go on about the fallacies of utilitarian ethics and economics and perhaps I will in a future posting. But I sense the end of this post, because we’ve walked our way around to my central argument. It’s this:

I like people working the cash register. I like the banter, the comments on the weather and the ability to seek help from a person with more answer options than a drop-down list. The human interaction isn’t a sidelight to the service; it’s an integral part of the service. I like the people at our Albertsons.

I like the tiny older woman with the German accent who is always so cheerful. I like the brash, big-haired, bossy gal who likes everyone but would never admit it. I like the guy who looks like John la Roquette and chooses wine for me to surprise Mary and I wonder how his recovery from a knee replacement is going. I like the Ukrainian guy who started as a cart runner with an impassable accent when the girls were little and is now the assistant manager.

I really like the Chinese guy who laughs when I spend several minutes pondering before giving in to the inevitable and asking for my standard pint of chow mein.  And the butcher who smiles as soon as she sees me and asks if I’ve remembered my list this time or if I need to call my wife?

We do need to work toward efficiencies that will allow is to help feed the world, not to mention the poorest family in our own town.  But that’s not what self-checking is about. Self-checking is about saving money at the cost of making us a little less human.

It’s not a tradeoff I’m willing to make.