Tuesday, November 5, 2024

Of the Supermarket Self-Checkout Machine: A Few Thoughts

The use of self-checkout machines in supermarkets says a lot about the manner in which business has employed automation--just as does its use of the phone tree in customer service. It is more eager to reduce its reliance on human workers than to maintain a tolerable quality of service, and to that end prone to rush systems not yet ready for use into the workplace, and leave their remaining employees, and their customers, to suffer the resulting problems.

The courtiers of business in the press, the kind who call a Jack Welch or a Ken Lay or a Sam Bankman-Fried a "genius," use words such as "innovation," "entrepreneurship" and "leadership" to denote such things.

Real people use . . . other words to describe the practice.

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