Business To Customers: “You Work For Us Now.”

You bought it. Now scan it, bag it and get out of here… 

By Gene Sculatti

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If you’ve been to the supermarket lately, you’ve probably seen-- and maybe used-- the self-serve check-out counters that have sprouted, conveniently, right next to the express lanes. Here helpful clerks give shoppers tutorials on how to place their purchases on the counter, scan them, pay for them, get change and their receipt back, then pack what they’ve bought into paper or plastic.
 
This do-it-yourself transaction is presented, as they all usually are, as a customer-friendly option, an innovation that the management of Megalomart came up with to save you time. But, of course, it’s a corporation-friendly gambit devised to save the chain labor costs. That helpful clerk giving instructions is helping management eliminate her job. (In California, where I live, the installation of a limited number of self-serve check-outs in various stores was part of the last union-supermarket contract agreement.) 

It wasn’t until recently, though, while listening to an almost 50-year-old radio aircheck, that I got some sense of how long this trend has been going on. In a 1961 newscast, sandwiched between Top-40 hits by Ray Charles and the Shirelles, the announcer read an item about President Kennedy planning a special commission to look into the effects of automation on the American worker. Back then the fear wasn’t that jobs from foundry-worker to art director to telephone operator would be carted off to Mexico or India, but that robotic arms and fingers would displace blue-collar cats just starting to make their way into the American Dream. (Catch them welding and bolting away in that clip of Martha & the Vandellas singing “Nowhere to Run” on the line at Ford’s Rouge plant.)


 
But that’s exactly it. As my friend, writer Jim Trombetta, put it, “The customer has become the robot.” Over the years, we’ve been conned into not just paying for our goods and services, but increasingly performing the work that the maker or seller of the goods formerly took on. Maybe in a year or so, we can be lured into unloading the trucks at the supermarket (after fully signing away our rights to sue if we get hernias) for a significant reduction in our grocery tabs.
 
This is the way, in the late ’60s, that self-serve gas was introduced: Forego full-serve, pump your own and you’ll pay less. Granted, as customers, we all naturally respond to the price reduction and/or time-saving of ATM’s, no-host airport check-ins, automated parking lots and customer-service hot-lines (don’t get me started), but in time all the benefits of doing it yourself have a way of mysteriously evaporating. There are no more full-serve gas pumps, the cost has continued to climb, and just how many extra milliseconds do you get from not forking over cash to the underpaid parking attendant?  

Not surprisingly, it seems, younger customers are the most willing participants in the self-serve check-out scam. Clearly, they’re already more comfortable with fully or partially computerized transactions than older folks are. They may also be more gullible, comprising the target audience, and presumably the most responsive cohort, of business’ latest off-loading of labor: corporations’ online invites for customers to “write your own ad.” Here the copywriter, like the supermarket clerk, gets his or her hours pruned back, this time by an American Idol style come-on that promises not price breaks or convenience but cash and (maybe even the more powerful draw) celebrity. It’s still You, Robot. 

The late great monologist Lord Buckley nailed it, back in the early ’50s, in a bit titled “The Supermarket.” That particular American intuition was a fairly fresh notion then, and with characteristic wit Buckley contrasted the bold new world of Safeway with what it had replaced: the corner grocer, who took the shopping list you handed him, then fetched the cans and packs and boxes from his walls, rang them up and bagged them for you. 

Now, says Buckley, 

You grab the cart and you go strolling up and down the aisles 
and you load up all your jazz 
and you're working for them, see?

But it's alright, because you're getting - 
this is the beginning and you’re happy with the 
very, very, low, low, low, low prices. 
Saving, you see. So you don't mind, you know, pushing a little bit.

And then a few years swing by and there you are:
Same supermarket, same cart, but the prices - Whoaa!
And you’re still pushin’ the mother [fucking] cart…
 
Keep on pushin.’

Gene Sculatti hosts Atomic Cocktail, Wednesdays and Saturdays.