I share your dismay with the way contemporary corporate culture is shuttling us towards machines where previously, in the Before Times, we would have interacted with a human. I'll confess that I've gotten somewhat quicker at self-checkout at my local Walmart; quicker to locate the bar codes and much more fluent at swiping them across the infrared-luminated glass reader. So there's that. My wife has pointed out just how many people aren't even entering Walmart and Kroger anymore, but farming out their food purchases to people hired for that purpose--people who now push carts through the store, squinting at lists of to-be-purchased foodstuffs uploaded electronically by people too lazy to do their own food shopping. She notes that as we age, as our bodies slowly lose muscle mass, we actually benefit from the walking around, the hoisting of boxes and cans down off shelves, the pushing of shopping carts out to the car, the loading and unloading the trunk. The everyday physical stuff is the stuff that keeps you healthy. So there's that.
I'll add one more category of thing that we don't see much anymore: the purchase point where no human oversees the transaction but where we are on our honor to leave payment. Is this a New England thing? I'm talking about the rural pumpkin patch or farm stand where a sign tells you what you're allowed to take ("No more than two pumpkins per person") and/or where to leave cash payment. The payment receptacle is usually a small lockbox with a slot in the top. THAT sort of virtue-driven antique folk practice. Once, many years ago, when I was a kid vacationing on Monhegan Island, ME, I assembled a little knick-knack stand, provisioned it with stuff I'd found out on the rocks and on the beach--a bleached crab shell, a striking hunk of driftwood--and, prompted by my mom, made some sort of sign with an arrow pointing towards the money-can, which was a Chock Full 'O Nuts coffee can with a slot hacked into the plastic top. "Please deposit payment here," it said. After spending an hour or two at my stand, selling a couple of things, and depositing the cash into the can, I went home for lunch, leaving the stand, and the honor code, and the cash-can, to fend for themselves. That's how we lived as late as the 1960s. I hope a few kids out there still get the chance to live like that.
I too am one of those who likes chatting up the cashier or clerk. I waited in line for 10 minutes at the grocery store yesterday as there were only 2 humans working. Lots of us doing the same. It's one thing if you just had a few items but I had a cart full, had coupons, and produce, which takes forever to figure out the system the one time I did do self checkout. A lot of places have a feedback survey or phone number at the bottom of the receipt and I let them know my opinion of self checkout. Suspect there is a large increase in 'shrinkage' (theft) that we are all paying for. But it's a perfect storm of record retirements in 2020 and 2021, fewer kids born post 2008 recession, fewer kids working and all of this 'fight for $15' nonsense that ultimately is resulting in a lot fewer jobs. And a lot less human interaction. It's sad.
Kids need to work and there are too many entitled teens these days who don’t want to work. Parents should avoid giving their kids allowances or paying them to do chores. Chores should be done automatically. My kids do chores and I would never pay them. When they are teens, I fully expect them to get jobs because I am not giving them money. Jobs are important to build character and work ethic.
Oh I agree. Growing up my friends and I all had jobs in HS and college, and so did our kids, although it took a lot of looking as they were teens during the 'great recession' but only a few of their friends even had jobs at all. Heard a lot of 'they don't have time to work' or 'their job is to be a student'. Yeah right, learning to juggle work, school and activities is a life skill and teaches them that they have to work for what they want in life.
A decade ago I was refusing to use self-checkout at CVS. A nice manager came over and offered to help me navigate it, and I told her very nicely I wasn't going to assist in extincting live human cashiers.
I sympathize with what you went through at Wendy's, but you didn't have to; you could've taken your custom elsewhere, explaining to your annoyed and disappointed kid why you did, and later written to the franchise and the head office why you won't be shopping there again. If we're not willing to inconvenience ourselves to fight for our principles large and small, we might as well roll over and give up. This rueful Substack post after the fact isn't really accomplishing very much.
We're at a moment in time when we've got to explain to our minor kids still at home why they'll need to deal with mom and dad being a little embarrassing, because of these principles, and why that awful pit-of-the-stomach feeling one gets standing apart from the crowd is something we've sometimes got to live through. I was in HS during the Civil Rights era, and I was shocked and horrified to begin understanding that the Pledge of Allegiance wasn't quite truthful, and I stopped putting my hand over my heart at assemblies, and I knew I must've given off a bit of that fear-sweat stink but I did it anyway.
I see this as a mixed bag. Like Erika, I hate the kiosks at fast food joints. Thankfully, I rarely go there, but it's brutal. "Get me a Big Mac and a medium Coke" to a human - even a teenager - is much faster. That said, I probably shop at the same CVS as Erika, and I get a kick out of the poor clerk turning her back to me and avoiding eye contact in an attempt to force me to the self checkout. I think about how they've obviously been trained to (try and) ignore us into compliance. So sad....
On the other hand, sometimes I'm next in line with 3 items, and the person in front of me at the cashier has about 20 items and two massive packages of Bounty paper towels. In that moment I will happily dash to the "do-it-yourself" counter and get out the door long before the other customer opens her change purse. So that's a plus!
If I only have a couple items at CVS, I'll gladly use the self-checkout but then the machine thinks I didn't put the item in the bag because it's so light in weight that the human worker has to come over anyway! Make it make sense! Savers is now ALL self checkout.
I think you are absolutely right that you are not whining about actual progress, but I think the thread bare social fabric you are lamenting has been deteriorating for generations. And I think perhaps the car you were filling up as a teenager is one example of the biggest culprit of all - motordom. After all, what has done more - in the name of progress - to undermine the social fabric than the personal motor vehicle? A number of European cities, and a few American ones too, have done a great deal recently to return human connection to their societies by reforming bad zoning policies and removing cars from neighborhood streets. Continuing those efforts around the country will do more to repair the social fabric than anything else possibly could.
I share your dismay with the way contemporary corporate culture is shuttling us towards machines where previously, in the Before Times, we would have interacted with a human. I'll confess that I've gotten somewhat quicker at self-checkout at my local Walmart; quicker to locate the bar codes and much more fluent at swiping them across the infrared-luminated glass reader. So there's that. My wife has pointed out just how many people aren't even entering Walmart and Kroger anymore, but farming out their food purchases to people hired for that purpose--people who now push carts through the store, squinting at lists of to-be-purchased foodstuffs uploaded electronically by people too lazy to do their own food shopping. She notes that as we age, as our bodies slowly lose muscle mass, we actually benefit from the walking around, the hoisting of boxes and cans down off shelves, the pushing of shopping carts out to the car, the loading and unloading the trunk. The everyday physical stuff is the stuff that keeps you healthy. So there's that.
I'll add one more category of thing that we don't see much anymore: the purchase point where no human oversees the transaction but where we are on our honor to leave payment. Is this a New England thing? I'm talking about the rural pumpkin patch or farm stand where a sign tells you what you're allowed to take ("No more than two pumpkins per person") and/or where to leave cash payment. The payment receptacle is usually a small lockbox with a slot in the top. THAT sort of virtue-driven antique folk practice. Once, many years ago, when I was a kid vacationing on Monhegan Island, ME, I assembled a little knick-knack stand, provisioned it with stuff I'd found out on the rocks and on the beach--a bleached crab shell, a striking hunk of driftwood--and, prompted by my mom, made some sort of sign with an arrow pointing towards the money-can, which was a Chock Full 'O Nuts coffee can with a slot hacked into the plastic top. "Please deposit payment here," it said. After spending an hour or two at my stand, selling a couple of things, and depositing the cash into the can, I went home for lunch, leaving the stand, and the honor code, and the cash-can, to fend for themselves. That's how we lived as late as the 1960s. I hope a few kids out there still get the chance to live like that.
I too am one of those who likes chatting up the cashier or clerk. I waited in line for 10 minutes at the grocery store yesterday as there were only 2 humans working. Lots of us doing the same. It's one thing if you just had a few items but I had a cart full, had coupons, and produce, which takes forever to figure out the system the one time I did do self checkout. A lot of places have a feedback survey or phone number at the bottom of the receipt and I let them know my opinion of self checkout. Suspect there is a large increase in 'shrinkage' (theft) that we are all paying for. But it's a perfect storm of record retirements in 2020 and 2021, fewer kids born post 2008 recession, fewer kids working and all of this 'fight for $15' nonsense that ultimately is resulting in a lot fewer jobs. And a lot less human interaction. It's sad.
Kids need to work and there are too many entitled teens these days who don’t want to work. Parents should avoid giving their kids allowances or paying them to do chores. Chores should be done automatically. My kids do chores and I would never pay them. When they are teens, I fully expect them to get jobs because I am not giving them money. Jobs are important to build character and work ethic.
Oh I agree. Growing up my friends and I all had jobs in HS and college, and so did our kids, although it took a lot of looking as they were teens during the 'great recession' but only a few of their friends even had jobs at all. Heard a lot of 'they don't have time to work' or 'their job is to be a student'. Yeah right, learning to juggle work, school and activities is a life skill and teaches them that they have to work for what they want in life.
Labor shortage is driving this. Paying employees $18/hour plus signing bonus is untenable. UBI will only make it worse.
A decade ago I was refusing to use self-checkout at CVS. A nice manager came over and offered to help me navigate it, and I told her very nicely I wasn't going to assist in extincting live human cashiers.
I sympathize with what you went through at Wendy's, but you didn't have to; you could've taken your custom elsewhere, explaining to your annoyed and disappointed kid why you did, and later written to the franchise and the head office why you won't be shopping there again. If we're not willing to inconvenience ourselves to fight for our principles large and small, we might as well roll over and give up. This rueful Substack post after the fact isn't really accomplishing very much.
We're at a moment in time when we've got to explain to our minor kids still at home why they'll need to deal with mom and dad being a little embarrassing, because of these principles, and why that awful pit-of-the-stomach feeling one gets standing apart from the crowd is something we've sometimes got to live through. I was in HS during the Civil Rights era, and I was shocked and horrified to begin understanding that the Pledge of Allegiance wasn't quite truthful, and I stopped putting my hand over my heart at assemblies, and I knew I must've given off a bit of that fear-sweat stink but I did it anyway.
I see this as a mixed bag. Like Erika, I hate the kiosks at fast food joints. Thankfully, I rarely go there, but it's brutal. "Get me a Big Mac and a medium Coke" to a human - even a teenager - is much faster. That said, I probably shop at the same CVS as Erika, and I get a kick out of the poor clerk turning her back to me and avoiding eye contact in an attempt to force me to the self checkout. I think about how they've obviously been trained to (try and) ignore us into compliance. So sad....
On the other hand, sometimes I'm next in line with 3 items, and the person in front of me at the cashier has about 20 items and two massive packages of Bounty paper towels. In that moment I will happily dash to the "do-it-yourself" counter and get out the door long before the other customer opens her change purse. So that's a plus!
If I only have a couple items at CVS, I'll gladly use the self-checkout but then the machine thinks I didn't put the item in the bag because it's so light in weight that the human worker has to come over anyway! Make it make sense! Savers is now ALL self checkout.
I think you are absolutely right that you are not whining about actual progress, but I think the thread bare social fabric you are lamenting has been deteriorating for generations. And I think perhaps the car you were filling up as a teenager is one example of the biggest culprit of all - motordom. After all, what has done more - in the name of progress - to undermine the social fabric than the personal motor vehicle? A number of European cities, and a few American ones too, have done a great deal recently to return human connection to their societies by reforming bad zoning policies and removing cars from neighborhood streets. Continuing those efforts around the country will do more to repair the social fabric than anything else possibly could.
Don't they realize they will lose their jobs if they are replaced by kiosks? I prefer real people too
My kids aren’t in 5th grade yet but I hope they have a great sex ed teacher like you!
💜💜💜💜