British supermarket chain Booths is scrapping its self-service machines and replacing them with living, breathing, talking, thinking human cashiers. Hooray! In a world that seems to leap, minute by minute, from one dystopian scenario to another, this is happy news.
Even better is that it’s not just Britain that’s trading in the automated misery chant of “unexpected items in the bagging area” for a trumpet of hope. CNN reports that major American chains including Costco, Walmart and Wegmans are also rethinking the loveless use of machines that can not tell an avocado from a banana no matter how loud you yell with frustration at it.
We should seize on the slim window of optimism offered by the turning of this heavily technofuturist tide. Philosophers of futurism have increasingly embraced a dark view of the present human moment. There’s a belief that we’ve transitioned away from sensing we live in what they called the “Vuca” cultural moment (“volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous”) into something more bleak. American anthropologist Jamais Cascio describes our new shared emotional reality as the “Bani” paradigm; “brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible”. To translate this into broadly pop-cultural terms; the generations who found the 1970 Donald Cammell/Nicolas Roeg movie Performance disturbingly relatable have perhaps just woken up to find themselves playing Balthazar Getty’s character of Pete Dayton in David Lynch’s Lost Highway … but after a hard night on stimulants and a punch to the face.
Community members, of course, visit their supermarket far more often than they do arthouse cinemas, and they have direct material experiences there. One can safely presume the near-ubiquity of automated checkouts in such supermarkets has done more to affirm fears of workplace scrapheaping, destroyed human value and cold technological outprogression than a thousand futurist summits.
“Affirming human warmth” is not, alas, one of the two main reasons for the corporate self-checkout rethink. Instead, cost-of-living pressures in a post-pandemic greedflation environment has – not that anyone as morally pure as a supermarket chain really wants to admit it – encouraged shoplifting at the same time the machines are already making mistakes. The merchandise-loss phenomenon of combined theft, malfunction and customer error is known in the industry as “shrink”, and the data is long in that self-checkout appears to have doubled the shrink that occurs with human cashiers.
The furious introduction of self-checkout kiosks that cost 75,000 retail jobs in Britain has demonstrably denuded American stores of enough staff to disincentivise stealing – structurally, it’s encouraged the opposite. “When even customers who want to pay for something struggle to flag down an employee,” the Atlantic wrote in September, the battle is lost.
A recent study found 39% of theft in America’s grocery stores occurred at self-checkouts. The responses from some retailers in the wake of these studies reveal a corporate preference for dystopianism-of-the-will over efficiency in modern managerial practice; having retrenched their cashiers, some shops are now employing more security to surveil customers at the scanners or inspect receipts at the gates. Despite the expensive outlay to buy the machines, others are now extending their investment in yet more technology to monitor customers – including the use of AI systems to identify any disruption to expected patterns of behaviour.
But others have, indeed, abandoned the experiment and embraced providing customers with a retail experience that customers again and again have stated they prefer. Consumers are right to be suspicious; the promises of the 1970s free-marketeers that competing businesses would be obliged to follow forces of customer sentiment were quickly forsaken for cabal-like corporate conformism. But if the wretched self-checkouts are being ripped out of the shops, I don’t care about the motivations; I’ll take it.
I’ll also take the possibility that rather than sink ourselves into passive acceptance of a future determined by corporate algorithms and ruthless greed, we, as a community, remind ourselves that we invented the democratic state to assert a stake in the future being created around us. The Dutch government was acting on democratic imperative amid demographic challenges of rising megacities, trends of overwork and technology’s reduction of human face-to-face interaction to combat social isolation and a “loneliness epidemic” affecting social health and wellbeing.
In 2019, as part of that government’s “One Against Loneliness” campaign, Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo trialled a “chat checkout”, or “kletskassa” lane in a Brabant store. Beyond the pace of a harried transaction, customers could feel comfortable to make conversation with their cashier. The target was the isolated elderly. Four years later, Jumbo have expanded kletskassa lanes to 200 stores because the trial revealed they appealed across all age groups – and employees gained meaning and purpose from staffing them. A rewarded Jumbo are now also providing “Coffee corners” in various locations for people to meet and chat with other locals and connect with community volunteers and support services.
It’s a far cry from the corporate-surveillance state nightmare of AI spying on suspected shoplifters at the beep-machines, and a bold rebuke to prophets who insist on inevitable, universal automation. Ditching the self-checkout for the old-fashioned chat lane shows us that the forces shaping the future are subject to brittle, anxious, non-linear and, perhaps, yes, incomprehensible pressure. And, maybe for humanity, that’s a positive thing.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist
