Part 1 of a 3-Part Series on Baby Boomers, New Technology and the Job Market
Since I Have to Do It Myself, Can I Get an Employee Discount?
Do you suppose we baby boomers would have readily adopted today’s technology if it had been available in our coming of age years? Would we have ignored the live music at Woodstock in order to send Tweets to our friends who couldn’t make it? Would we have held up our back-lit cell phones at the end of a concert instead of cigarette lighters? Would we have gotten pulled into the world of Facebook, blogging, virtual worlds, online games and downloading digital songs one-by-one instead of buying vinyl albums?
Possibly. But one thing we probably would have had a lot of trouble with then, as we do today, is the idea that thanks to new technology jobs in the service industry are disappearing faster than dinosaurs in the ice age. Service has been replaced by self-service, or is it really self-serving on the part of the companies implementing it?
Today we’re being asked, actually more like ordered, to fill out our own forms, do our own price checks, check ourselves in and out and pick up and assemble our own goods. I miss travel agents. One call and I got reservations, at the best prices, for travel, hotels and car rentals. Recently it took me three hours just to book an airline flight by myself. I ended up sitting in the baggage compartment and they charged a luggage surcharge. I did get a very polite text message thanking me for my business when it was all over.
Maybe it’s just me. I don’t seem to do well with voice menus. I miss hearing a friendly human voice, called a “receptionist” for those too young to remember, who could figure out who I wanted to talk to and who never left me on hold. Now we are left on our own to navigate from voice menu to voice menu like explorers in the wilderness. It seems that almost every administrative task a modern company has is now being assigned to its customers to do themselves.
I got a nasty text message from my cell phone provider last week that I was 17 minutes overdue on paying my monthly charges. After several hours of exploring voice menus (you’d think a phone company would at least have operators) I was able to get someone who spoke English and I explained that I never got a bill. I was told I have to go to their website and check on the billing myself. They no longer send out invoices, paper or electronic, preferring apparently to rely on ESP.
Some of the most insidious machines being foisted on us today in the name of “better service” are self-service checkout counters. You will find these at retail stores, airports, movie theaters, train stations, libraries, restaurants and a place where we all end up eventually (no, not the mortuary but that’s on the way I’m sure) – grocery stores. I am afraid of self-checkout lanes and avoid them like the plague, especially after I saw one customer who was forced to the ground and strip searched for allegedly stealing grapes when the machine reported “unexpected item in the bagging area.”
But I did try to use a self-service checkout once. The first thing to know is that they are built by the same company that made torture devices during the Spanish inquisition. It’s no coincidence that one of the biggest selling scanner products is called “The Rack.” The machine came to life as I approached it and demanded that I insert an ATM card and then place my items one at a time on the scanner bed. At least it wasn’t singing “Daisy, Daisy” like HAL in 2001.
I started with several large Fuji apples but nothing registered. I put them in the shopping bag anyway. All my items were fresh produce and the same thing happened each time. Giddy with the bargain I was obviously getting from some unknown in-store special sale, I just kept on putting goods in the bag unaware that I was supposed to do a special lookup on produce like a real cashier. The one really solid item I had was a can of stewed tomatoes. I placed it on the scanner and it registered $1.79. I pressed “Done” and waited while it added tax and subtracted $1.92 from my ATM account.
As soon as I placed the can in the shopping bag a loud siren went off. The store lights dimmed, a spotlight was turned on me and red lights flashed in all directions. I had no idea what was happening. A loud voice commanded “step away from the counter, sir.” I was grabbed by two large guards who took me to a cell-like room at the front of the store and interrogated me for twenty minutes.
I answered a battery of questions about my produce preferences, what exactly I intended to do with celery stalks, did I know the acidic content of oranges and, I’m sure, other relevant aspects of my innermost thoughts about fruits and vegetables. I finally convinced them it was my first time at an automated check-out counter and was released on my own recognizance with a sharp warning.
Several weeks later I received a survey form in the mail thanking me for shopping at the store and asking about my experience with their customer service. It asked if I would recommend their store to someone else and could I also provide a name for them to contact. I thought long and hard about it before writing in, “Dick Cheney.”
Note: It’s difficult to find significant industry statistics on the use of self-service checkout systems beyond the glad-talk hype of companies selling them. However, several independent studies have shown mixed reactions by consumers to this new technology. One age-related study out of the University of New Mexico found that older consumers are more skeptical of self-checkout, generally don’t like or trust the technology, prefer to interact with human cashiers and generally believe that self-service is mostly motivated by corporate self-interest. The U.S. Labor Dept. reports that the median hourly wage of cashiers in all industries is $8.49. We have to wonder just how much money companies think they are actually saving by replacing those jobs with multi-million dollar automation systems.
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