It was bound to happen sooner or later. One of the groceries nearest me installed several “self-checkout” stations, replacing a couple of previously staffed grocery check-outs. Unluckily for me, I discovered the change on a recent Sunday morning when, as later became evident, the only in-person checkout clerk was temporarily on break. With some grumbling and some help from another grocery purchaser, I eventually managed to get my substantial order through the self-checkout station, bagged into the reusable cloth bags I’d brought with me, and back into my grocery cart to be wheeled out to my car. On my way out the door, I happened to see someone at the customer service station. I complained about the lack of in-person service.
“We only do that during slow periods,” she told me. “Had you waited ten minutes, there would have been someone to serve you in person.” Not entirely mollified, I wheeled my cart out to the car, loaded my groceries in the trunk, and then replaced the cart in the outdoor cart enclosure.
The next time I did battle with the self-checkout was fairly early on a Saturday morning. This time, my order was much smaller. There was a single in-person clerk helping other customers, but the line to his station was long. A couple of the self-service checkouts were out of service. Still, I lined up to get the next available station, figuring it could be faster than waiting for in-person service. Wrong.
The items I’d purchased were on special, with a substantial discount for buying in quantity. I thought my purchases qualified, but the price shown at the self-checkout station was the “non-quantity” price. Reluctant to pay “extra,” I pushed the “get help” icon, only to learn from the somewhat harried in-person checkout clerk that the only person authorized to help me was on bathroom break. Eventually, this store manager returned and explained the somewhat convoluted programming of self-help pricing, which could only validate quantities once one hit “finish and pay.” It sort of made sense, so I’ll be somewhat better prepared on any further self-checkout encounters.
Of course, staffing and customer service practices have been evolving for a long time. You might need to be beyond retirement age to remember when banks had only in-person tellers, none of the now-ubiquitous automated teller machines (ATMs). You might need to be even older, and an urban dweller, to remember an early experiment in “automated food,” a series of Horn and Hardart restaurants that served both hot and cold fresh meals via a set of coin-operated vending machine windows. The restaurants thrived in the early part of the twentieth century, but went out of business later when changing demographic patterns and widespread moves to the suburbs made much center-city dining obsolete.
A while ago, I ran across the term “prosumer” in an article in a popular magazine. The article’s author contended that much of what we used to expect as “consumers” of services had now been built into automated processes. The “consumer” was now expected to do parts of the work previously performed by a live person, a “producer”—perhaps a grocery store clerk, a bank teller, or a mail carrier. As I read, it occurred to me that the “people in your neighborhood” sung about in an earlier children’s television show, Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood, might no longer exist for contemporary children.
I’m realistic enough to know that any sort of imagined personal service utopia is just that—a situation that never totally existed. In the “old days,” you might be likely to encounter a crabby or clueless clerk or server in person. Having to “do battle” with some of our overly impersonal “automated service providers” now is only a difference in degree. Still, I relish the encounters I have with our neighborhood’s in-person providers—the mail carrier who knows my name and habits and watches out for me, the bank clerk who walks me through a complex transaction, the grocery checkout staffer who chats with each customer when time allows, and always sends us off with his signature, “Have a grateful day!” Yes!
Jinny's Occasional Poems 