What Next?

Good morning everyone, hope the coffee's good. Went to the grocery store late last night, had to get some cigarettes and a few other things. Come up to the check out counter and all that was open were four lines of the "self checkout" variety. All went fairly well, which isn't always the case, until I got to the cigarettes; "Please show your ID to the cashier". What cashier, I wondered? Aren't I, technically, in this case, the cashier? I tried showing my ID to myself, but the machine didn't seem impressed. Maybe it wanted someone with a nametag? So I looked around me, there were several 'cashiers' just like me and they all seemed to be doing the same; looking around for someone. So there we stood all of us looking for someone who could make the machine happy. At this point one is tempted to say 'the hell with it' and leave. However, you've already invested the time in coming to the store, walking down the aisles and half way checking out. Besides, if you didn't really need what you came for, you wouldn't have come in the first place. Finally, our hero came from the back, someone wearing a nametag and an annoyed look. Glancing at all of us, she aggressively punched a few keys on her machine and retreated back to wherever she had come from. We were all able to complete our check out, but I noticed that the people behind us were looking a bit apprehensive. Twenty minutes after beginning what should have been about a five-minute process, I was done.

When grocery stores were first started, the world was a much different place. The word that businesses went by was a now forgotten word called 'service'. You would come into the grocery store, tell the grocer what you wanted and they would go and get it for you. Of course, that was in the day before 'brands' were a big thing. A pound of butter, was a pound of butter, there were no choices. So, choice is a good thing I guess and grocers became 'supermarkets'. Supermarkets offered more choices, supposed competition kept prices lower. The only drawback was that now you had to walk through the aisles and shop for your own food put it in your cart and bring it to the grocer (now called a cashier). However, once you completed that task, the rest was done for you. The cashier took your items, rang them up and handing them to a 'sack boy', who would sack your groceries, put them in the cart and then he would actually take them out and put them in your car! Service, again, was still a key concept.

I think that it first started with Wal-mart (oh the issues I have with that place), someone got the bright idea to have the customers bag their own purchases. Why this idea was considered a good thing, I'll never know, but it was the beginning of the end to me. It wasn't long after that 'self-checkout' lanes started to appear. At first, they were simply adjuncts to the normal checkout lines. They were convenient, especially if you only had a few things and wanted to get out quickly. Kind of a self serve express lane. I was ok with it at first; I thought 'this is a great idea'. Then I began to notice a shift, where there used to be 4 human staffed lanes open, suddenly there was one, or occasionally two if things were getting really backed up. There have been several times when there have been no lanes except the self-checkouts open, even in the middle of the day.

What happened to service? Are these supposed low prices being given to us in exchange for service? Is the customer no longer important; is it just his/her money that counts now?

So I wonder, what's next? We'll go to the warehouse, pull the things out of the boxes, scan them ourselves, pay for them and load them in the car? Wait, we already do that in some stores. I guess the next step is going to each manufacturer and picking it up ourselves, taking it to the store, pricing it, then to the self-checkout. Maybe for fresh produce, they'll have a giant farm out back so we can go pick it ourselves too. Of course it would all be done in the name of passing the lower costs to us, funny how those 'lower' costs never seem to translate into lower prices.