My checkout process at City Market went smoothly yesterday, in spite of the fact that I was handling it myself, through the computerized self-check aisle.
I’ve pretty much got the hang of scanning various shapes… egg cartons, loaves of artisan bread, avocados, olive oil in weird-shaped bottles, almond-coconut coffee creamer, broccoli… You have to present each item to the scanning machine, holding the item at precisely the proper angle, so the machine can read the funny little rectangle of lines located somewhere on the packaging.
It’s not exactly intuitive. I’ve never been clear about where, exactly, the “eyes” of the machine are located, but most of the time I can manage to elicit the machine’s electronic voice — “Place your broccoli in the bag, and scan your next item” — after a couple of tries. That’s how the machine rewards me, psychologically, for correctly scanning each item; it allows me to try to scan the next item.
Some people still prefer to take their groceries through the old-fashioned check-out aisles, to allow an employee to scan the items and take the money. I can understand why people still do this — especially senior citizens. For one thing, it seems to go faster. The check-out clerks have obviously been trained and know where the machine’s eyes are located; they generally zip right through the scanning process, and know how to count the correct change.
On the other hand, there’s generally a long of line of people with fully-loaded shopping carts waiting in line ahead of me. (Once again, I picked the wrong time of day to shop for groceries. But so did everyone else.)
Then there’s the problem of making small talk with the check-out clerk. I was never good at small talk.
So, instead, I struggle through the self-check aisle. The machine has no use, whatsoever, for small talk; it’s all business. “Place your avocado in the bag and scan your next item…”
Things weren’t this way, when I was a kid. The world has become a lot more complicated.
When I was a kid, my mom handled the shopping duties for the family… and with only a high school education. All the bread was shaped the same. All the Crisco cans were the same size. Who had even heard of ‘avocados’?
You didn’t have to choose between self-check and full-service checkout. A high school boy bagged your groceries for you, and would even carry them to your car.
Milk and cream and other dairy products arrived on the front porch each morning, typically in glass bottles. How convenient was that?
We had a telephone. When it made a ringing noise, you picked it up and talked. You didn’t have to decide what app to use.
Weekends were actually weekends. And you could hang out at the bar until 3am, if you wanted. Like, if your wife had locked the door. And you probably had some friends there, who were also locked out.
But life got complicated, and I’d really like to find someone to blame for that. I would be tempted to blame computers — they don’t have feelings, so they wouldn’t care if I blamed them — but I have a sneaking suspicion that computers are designed and programmed by people. It’s very possible that the computers have already taken over, and they’re now designing and programming themselves. But the world is so complicated, I don’t know if that’s true.
In fact, I don’t know if anything is true.
Have we been suffering through a global health emergency for the past year?… Or was it all just a big hoax so that evil governments could inject of us with microscopic computer chips that will end up controlling our brains? Who really knows?
I would actually appreciate someone else controlling my brain, right about now. Maybe they can figure out how to stop the threatening messages that appear on my phone, from people I’ve never heard of. Whenever I call them back, I get a recording asking me to punch in my credit card number… and when I do… nothing. They hang up on me.
This is human progress?
Recorded messages that hang up on me?
Bagging my own groceries?
I’m really starting to wonder.
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.