You provide the service, and guess what -- you don't get paid.
Saturday 4:00 PM. Disaster impends. People are coming for dinner in an hour and I need acorn squash and long grain rice. These are not available at Trader Joe's, the only market I like, because they have neither long grain rice (so obvious; try jasmine!) or acorn squash right now because of the cold weather back East.
Mr. Emmet isn't home. There's no alternative. I must Go To Von's.
Our local Von's (part of the Safeway Empire) undertook a huge makeover right about the time the wonderful independent market went under. Blob-like, it consumed the Rite Aide next door to it. Like dough rising with Fleischmann's Rapid Rise Yeast, it bulked up to create extra parking. Like the set for the Oscars, it gleams with Satanic energy.
Saturday 4:10 I enter the maw of the vast, gleaming megalodon with no guarantee I'll ever escape. The produce section stretches half a block, all the way across the store. I locate the squash by chance, camouflaged amongst the sweet potatoes. But the rice! There's no helpful rice signage to be seen. I wander through acres devoted to vitamin water, sports drinks, athletic drinks, soft drinks, fruit drinks, punch, cookies, and crackers, into a blind alley of products whose only commonality seems to be that they all cost a lot. Time races past. Finally, dehydrated, exhausted and trembling, I find a tiny cache of actual rice, including, thank the gods, regular uncooked unadulterated white long grain.
Saturday 4:45 Clutching my finds plus a bottle of wine in case we don't have enough, I head for the half block long expanse of checkout stands. The store isn't very crowded yet but there are long lines here. Why? I look for an Express line and find one. It's unstaffed. Now that I look closely I see that ALL the checkout stands except two are unstaffed, and those two have lines of customers that stretch back past the produce into the mists rising from the frozen food aisles.
But wait! Over by one of the actual exits is another, shorter line. Why is that?
Ah hah. That would be the self service area. Here you, the customer, get to scan your groceries through the machine, which will tell you what you owe, and then you'll put money into the machine and it'll spit out your change (ha ha, just kidding) and then you'll bag up your stuff and go home.
I hate this. The corporate scum who own these companies will expand "self-service" checkstands endlessly because these machines don't form unions or demand overtime or even hourly wages. Of course they don't think either, but that's not a problem because the customer can think, and can be trained to use the machines. O, what a glorious world awaits! Soon supermarkets will operate without any floor staff at all! They can get robots to stock the shelves, and customers to do the checkout. It worked with the gas stations except in Oregon and New Jersey. Fortunately, I don't smoke, or I'd've immolated myself by now like the models in Zoolander.
Dinner guests are imminent. I take another step on the road to dystopia and go to the self service line. When my turn comes, I go to the machine and it tells me to scan my first item. The acorn squash looks problematic, so I scan the bottle of wine first to build confidence. Lights flash and an employee appears from nowhere to tell me I can't buy wine at the self service machine because it can't (yet) make sure I'm over 21.
"I hate these machines! I hate this store! Why are you letting them replace your jobs with these things? Why don't they get some more checkers out on the floor? Look at these lines! How can you stand this? Does management limit how many cashiers you can have on the floor? Are you management?" Flames come out my nose.
"I agree completely, ma'am," Store Employee says (either because he does agree or because he thinks I might explode and make a mess). "Here's a checkstand right here." I think he might've added "There, there." I apologize for yelling. It's hardly his fault.
Been to Macy's or any other big clothes store lately? There's one cashier in the middle of each floor and no one to tell you where you might find another shirt like the one you're wearing or even where the bathroom is. Want to make plane reservations? No way unless you can navigate the website; you certainly can't talk to a real person. At my local bank branch, the manager actually told me that corporate headquarters tells them how many tellers they can have at the counter, because they want more people to bank via cellphone.
Machines have replaced some jobs and changed others since the Industrial Revolution; that's nothing new. But what's happening in these cases isn't the machine replacing an employee's job. It's the customer replacing the employee's job. For free.
And you know which way the savings are going to be passed. Straight up the corporate ladder, in accordance with the siphon up theory.