Picture the scene, if you will. A young man working for The Pessimist Chronicles (we'll call him 'Alex White' for the sake of argument) walks into any one of the well-known British supermarkets or British newsagent chains. He buys many items, and is approached by a smiley young woman asking him to use the self-service checkout, as this will be 'easier' than conversing with a real human being. He declines, but she puts on such a patronising voice he feels obliged to follow her lead, rather than risk looking like a total luddite. He scans his first item.
*beep*
*please place item in bagging area*
Everything seems straightforward enough. He does as instructed.
*unexpected item in bagging area*
'Well, that seems a little odd, since you asked me to put it in there and as such, Patronising Electronic Female Voice, it can hardly have been "unexpected", now, can it? No matter, however, fair maiden: I shall simply jiggle the bag about and see if it picks up my two litre bottle of fizzy red-and-white-labbeled black drink whose name I can't reveal for advertising purposes.'
*have you moved your bag?*
'Well, yes, actually, I was just trying to make you pick up my rather heavy item that a human being couldn't miss. I'll take it out an put it back in, such is the logical course of action.'
*have you removed something from your bag?*
'Oh, sorry, I'll put it back.'
*unexpected item in bagging area*
'Sorry, I'll just -'
*have you removed something from your bag?*
'Yes, I -'
*unexpected item in bagging area*
'What? How can -'
*please wait for assistance*
'Okay, okay, I'm calm. I will wait for the moody gentleman to come over and help get this thing to work. I mean, a human being would have got me out of here by now but we can't have everything. Embracing technology and all that, what?'
*please place item in bagging area*
Timidly, he obliges.
A pause...
...
...
*unexpected item in bagging area. please wait for assistance*
'FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUU -'
Enough of that.
The above scenario, while clearly created by yours truly, is not, I am sad to say, entirely fictional. Despite the fictional nature of the idea of anyone screaming an expletic out in the middle of a supermarket and the inclusion of my new fictional character Alex White, what I have just described has, sadly, occurred on several occasions. Not just to me, but to many people I know, and I have even seen it happen to complete strangers, the hatred we share for these contraptions bringing us closer spiritually (or so I would like to think).
The main problem I find with self-service checkouts is the absolute absurdity of them. There are many points of contention to be found concerning them, and in this article - the second of a proposed ten - I would like to highlight a few of them.
First off, while we exist in a digital age, we also exist in an age where we place far too much faith in computers. As will be discussed in a future instalment of the 'Pessimist's Guide', we effectively live in a world were our lives are at the mercy of computers. How? You will have to wait to find out. I am sure you are aware, however, that we use them for everything. Our music; our work; our leisure; our shopping; our memes (for the internerds among us); our weekly fixture of videos featuring doormice snoring - the list seems endless. But if there is one thing we can't use a computer for, it is buying that one loaf of bread we so desperately need to nestly our slices of ham between, of which we ran out yesterday and which we need right this minute. A quick pop into town should solve the situation. ven here, however, we find the computer has taken over. And it is this which causes all the problems in our lives. The most damaging aspect of this is that we ar steadily being taken to a place where human being will no longer exist. I am not suggesting that dawning upon us is an age of real-life cybermen - nothing so extreme is coming, in my mind (or is it? You will have to read Part 3 to find out). I am merely stating that, as one of the primary aspects of humanity is our ability to form relationships and to communicate with one another, if this is taken away from us we ourselves become little more than machines. What happened to the smiley shopkeeper who knew us all? He got sacked and replaced by a computer with an atonal unmelodious emotionless soundboard and an inbuilt bleeping sound.
Which brings me neatly on to my second point. As I write, the issue of gross unemployment is constantly being communicated to us by the various news corporations. not a day goes by when we don't hear that the amount of university postgraduates out of work is six times higher than the amount who even actually got in to university or that more people are on jobseekers' allowance than live in Luembourg... or something like that - I'm not entirely clued up when it comes to the exact figures. The point is, for every self-service checkout installed, that is one more person effectively out of a job. If shops and supermarkets continue to upgrade the 'customer experience', we will eventually fall victim to even worse employment issues than were experienced during the Great Depression of the 1930s (if you haven't read Walter Greenwood's novel Love on the Dole, I suggest you do so, if only to make sure you have a clear picture ingrained within your mind's eye as to what we most definiately do not want to happen to Great Britain ever again). But will it really be as avoidable as I would like to think? Supermarkets are, after all, a product of capitalist society; is it not expected, therefore, that there biggest concern must not be the safety, security and happiness of their employees, but their level of profit? What self-service checkouts are, above all, is cheap. Dirt cheap. In fact, in the long run, I would argue that topping up a jar of dirt over the course of several years would probably cost you more in the long run than maintaining a self-service checkout. As such, it seems terrifyingly likely that, before long, we will have shops with virtually no human employees, and our shopping will instead be at the mercy of the terrible robots with the inbuilt bleeping sound.
Third on the agenda, as such, in a way contradicts the second point. In fact, I do not think I am that worried about the ultimate 'takeover' of our shopping experience by these cybernetic tyrants; after all, for every bank of self-service checkouts, there always has to be someone there to make the things work for you when they find it impossible to accept that you actually have placed that 1 kilogram packet of self-raising flour in the bagging area. In addition to this, age-restricted products still need someone there to authorise their sale, so in reality we still have to converse with human beings anyway, and... dare I say it... you might as well have gone to the checkouts. Just sayin' (although I have noticed that the dear people who work around the self-service area do seem to do their utmost not to make any form of contact or utterance of conversation with you. What is that in thir eyes? Fear? More likely loathing and contempt).
Which brings me to my fourth point: as has already been scripted at the start of this article, one thing you don't get from a human being is the following.
Assistant: Hello, how are you today?
*beep*
*hands loaf of bread across*
Alex: I'm good, thank you. Yourself?
*puts bread in bag for life*
Assistant: *pause*
Alex: *wtf face*
Assistant: I'm sorry...
Alex: *further wtf faceness*
Assistant: You have an unexpected item in the bagging area. please wait for assistance.
*swivels round in chair*
Barry? Come and give us a hand mate...
Alex: FFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUU...
You get the idea with that...
Do we really need all this stress? Are we really so completely at the mercy of the machine that we have to get them to do everything for us? Are we really, as a species, so afraid of human contact that we have try to avoid it at all cost? What's the point of these things if you still need someone there to confirm you're over eighteen, the real fact of the matter being that, if there's one thing a computer can't do, its look at you and make a judgement of your age based upon your appearance? Are we so obsessed with being independent and doing everything for ourselves that we simply ca't bear to allow someone to do something for us? What next? Self-service five-star restaurants?
Come on, humanity. Let's get rid of these awful things. They do nothing other than rob us of our humanity and cause us more stress than we need when all we're doing is buying heavily processed food with enough salt in it to dependently help us on our way to an early heart-related death. Let's get rid of these things, people, and just return to the days of old, where shopping could be a fun and sociable experience. They say we don't talk enough anymore - stop trying to make us do the bidding of machines, then.
'Nuff said.
William D. Green
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