Don't hate self-checkouts. Fight something else, instead
Please look for community, and create it, where it MATTERS.
The Guardian is hailing, as a sign that people can "push back against the technofuturist tide", the announcement that a chain of British supermarkets is ditching self-checkouts that "saved corporate chains money on retail wages – but come at a price for our shared sense of community".
These are the most interesting passages of that piece (emphasis mine):
British supermarket chain Booths is scrapping its self-service machines and replacing them with living, breathing, talking, thinking human cashiers. Hooray! In a world that seems to leap, minute by minute, from one dystopian scenario to another, this is happy news.
One can safely presume the near-ubiquity of automated checkouts in such supermarkets has done more to affirm fears of workplace scrapheaping, destroyed human value and cold technological outprogression than a thousand futurist summits.
Beyond the pace of a harried transaction, customers could feel comfortable to make conversation with their cashier.
I’ll also take the possibility that rather than sink ourselves into passive acceptance of a future determined by corporate algorithms and ruthless greed, we, as a community, remind ourselves that we invented the democratic state to assert a stake in the future being created around us.
This is really noble, and I really don't get it
The real nature and the root causes of any revolt against self-checkouts and automation in general are, just like any complete answer to them, much wider than supermarkets as such. This said, we must all eat, and even a discussion limited to groceries and their checkouts may produce very important results, so let's do that.
I cannot exclude that self-checkout kiosks and counters will disappear from all grocery stores, everywhere. Yes, today they don’t work for many customers. The web is full of reports about how worst they are than human cashiers, and slower too. But this happens in the same planet where air travel royally sucks, compared to 50 or even 20 years ago, yet it keeps rising, precisely because what makes it suck also keeps it affordable for more people.
Since people can live without air travel, but not without affordable food, it seems quite likely that if self-checkout disappears, it will be for purely economic reasons, not righteous indignation. That is, it will disappear, as the article itself explains, only if technology (including AI, which is already tackling this issue) will remain unable to make supermarkets without human cashiers more profitable for their owners than today.
The specific arguments and feeling I quoted above, however, are a completely different issue, that can distract from the really important stuff. Including, quoting again "reminding ourselves that we invented the democratic state to assert a stake in the future being created around us"... where it really matters.
Those arguments and feeling are basically the same, equally myopic ones I've met several times here in Italy, even if the modernization most often blamed here seems to be that of public post offices, not supermarkets.
Here in Italy, there are people arguing that we should keep paying bills or send registered mail from public post offices, instead of digitally. Besides saving jobs, that would be good, they say, because the time spent in line there is a great occasion for many people, and one of the very few still left to senior citizens, to fight loneliness and depression, by chatting with other real humans.
As far as public post offices are concerned, I can only point out that the same tax money now spent to maintain and staff those offices would be much, much better used to hire more public nurses, doctors and teachers. Real human value and contact are more needed, every day, in public hospitals, schools and real social services for our elders, than when paying some utility bill.
Speaking of supermarkets...
First of all, "destroyed human value and cold technological outprogression" in grocery shopping is what started happening decades ago, when the same supermarkets that should "remain" human today started destroying farmer markets, pop-and-mom grocery stores and other neighborhood shops. Even if self-checkout kiosks in 2023 and beyond were bad for those reasons, they would be just the seal on a death certificate.
Next, it may be useful to consider how many of the same customers who strive to preserve the human value of chatting with their cashiers:
could afford and would accept the higher prices required to keep those cashiers working, with a just, living wage, in these times of "working poor rising sharply" more or less everywhere
would accept, or could cope with, the same opening hours and days of the good old family stores, that is giving back to the same cashiers the time to foster and enjoy the human value of raising their kids, or spend evenings and holidays with family and friends
know that without self-checkouts, that is with higher prices, there may be (even in the UK), more people shoplifting the cheapest supermarket food, because they can't even afford that
buy online everything else they can, jobs in little stores be damned, because they have no time or money to do otherwise, or are too stressed by a "Hustle Culture that Might Kill Them Before Anything Else Does"
for the same reasons, never actually talk with their friends or relatives, just text them
buy as much as they can on Black Fridays or Cyber Mondays, that are bleak days for online and physical retail workers alike, and their season to be exploited (tip: why not try a Buy Nothing Day this year?)
can afford to worry that, whoever checks it out, much supermarket food is produced with excessive health, social or environmental costs, sometimes traveling literally half the world for NO acceptable reason before reaching the shelf
Above all, it would be useful to acknowledge that "human value" is found when work and chores (which for many do include grocery shopping) leave everybody, cashiers included, enough time and security to relax chatting with others... anywhere but through a checkout counter. If you are reduced to find human value there, it's because you were already scraping the ground below the barrel of human togetherness, not its bottom.
Before continuing, please notice how little or nothing of the above issues would change, if self-checkouts had never been invented.
What to fight, BEFORE self-checkouts
Personally, I have nothing against human cashiers, and nothing against self-checkouts. If it takes the same time or less, I'll always choose the human-equipped counter, of course, but only because of better service, not to chat.
Regardless of my preferences, however, the presumption that automated checkouts in supermarkets have affirmed "fears of workplace scrapheaping and destroyed human value" more than, say, summits like Davos it's silly. Should it turn out to be the only or first straw that finally breaks the backs of the right camels, I'd still thank self-checkouts, of course. But in and by itself, it's just silly. A reality check is needed.
I'm all for fighting human (which is not the same as "workplace") scrapheaping and protecting human value. But self-checkouts? The moment really working self-checkouts arrive, don't worry about them just because they are the one bit of a wholly broke system that's literally in your face when it's time to pay. Reforming modern supermarkets starting from what likely is, by far, their less harmful piece is like building a home starting from the roof.
If you really want to "assert a stake in the future being created around us" DO worry, instead, about your local combination of real issues like (please add your in the comments):
urban neighborhoods where, thanks to clueless refusals of 15-minute cities, the closest source of decent food is so far or so unserved by public transit that every resident must drive to get there, usually alone
imposed lifestyles, mad workplace "cultures" and urban planning that make it easier and more appealing to know by first name some cashier of that far away supermarket than your next door neighboor, one tiny landing away
supermarkets having continuous "fire sales" on data about you
policies and regulations that make economically unsustainable, or outright illegal, to reboot everything else of supermarkets in a really sane way
Like, for example, supermarkets where checkout may even be only automatic, and shelves may even be filled only by robots... but with bulk food and beverages, as local as possible, that human grocery clerks would pick, cut or pour on the moment, in the exact quantities you ask them, to drop them in your own reusable containers.
With real clerks that not only served you exactly, only what you need, without any waste in food or packaging, and could greet you saying "don't worry Mr Smith, I had already put apart 350 grams of your favourite pasta"... why on Earth should you bother, or feel alone, if checkout were automatic?
If you have other ideas for really sane urban supermarkets, that use technology and automation in the common interest, please share them, I’d like to include them a follow-up piece.
Meanwhile… If you'd like me to have the time and money to pay my groceries to human cashiers, please consider a paid subscription, or even a one-time donation as explained here. Do so, and I promise that I will spend as much as possible of the time saved by not paying for groceries with other means, plus the time I may saved just thanks to self-checkouts to volunteer in my neighborhood.
(1) The hoax is the same of all the car commercials that show, to people who more often than not would only drive it in urban traffic jams, how good that car looks when crossing wonderful landscapes without any annoying human in sight. Here, the common element is ONE, obviously upper-class looking shopper, all alone in the store, as it will never happen in real life