"What a shame! What are you doing?..." These are the most polite phrases my children dedicated to me the day that, in a supermarket in my Sants neighborhood belonging to a very well-known chain, I refused to scan the products I had just bought myself. They didn't call me a Luddite or a technophobe, but it was close! All because, in an act of rebellion, I refused to follow the instructions of a manager who was directing supermarket traffic and stayed in the checkout line.
Some retail distribution chains have had the idea of installing self-checkout registers where you manage the payment of products yourself. A priori, these checkouts are for people who buy few items and want to save time. Express checkout, they initially called it. I admit that, in some chains, they do implement it with that concept of time-saving, but establishments that replace people working at the checkout with machines are increasingly proliferating.
If you are a digital migrant and clash with your beloved offspring, digital natives avant la lettre, conflict is guaranteed. New generations prefer to avoid looking people in the face and interact with a machine, whether to get a train ticket or shop at the supermarket. Hence the indignation of my own when they saw that I was not following the rules set by "modernity."
New generations prefer to avoid looking people in the face and interact with a machineI am very clear that this is the present. We will interact less and less with people and more with machines. A couple of summers ago I was in the store that Amazon Goin Seattle. If you download the corresponding app, you enter, take the products, and leave. The overpopulation of cameras that flood the ceiling and walls of that supermarket perfectly capture everything you choose, and with the app's geolocation, they nail it. Result: When you cross the threshold of the exit door, everything you've bought is automatically charged to the account you opened with the app. No checkout, no cashier, no paper receipt, no queues. Convenient and fast. This is what there is. The next step will be to replace the workers who make the supermarket's logistics possible with robots.
But the case of self-checkout lanes is different. Not only have they reduced the number of workers, but they also force the person at the cash register to attend to people who get stuck with the self-checkout machine. A hell of a lot of stress for that worker. And also stress for customers who queue at the traditional checkout or those who, pushed like indolent cattle to the slaughterhouse, have chosen to do the transaction themselves.
I've been shopping at that supermarket for years and I always go through the checkout with a cashier. If I have to queue, I do. Refusing to do the checkout myself, despite the presence of a very insistent security guard who, day in and day out, points me to the self-checkout lanes. And yes, indeed, given this behavior, I have long endured the teasing of my offspring, who call me analog and a caveman.
Until one day, in the final stretch of the magnificent British BBC and HBO series Years and Years, written and directed by Russel T. Davies and starring the revered Emma Thompson, we were all astonished listening to the grandmother of the Lyons family, when she stated that the authoritarian drift of society began the day they fired the supermarket cashiers and customers accepted to check themselves out without resistance, or even protesting. (If you haven't seen this series, it's worth doing so. It's tough, it has been defined as a nihilistic projection of the future, but it is quite careful and faithfully describes everything that is happening and is yet to come. If you're not an HBO subscriber, subscribe now! You have other gems like Chernobyl or The Handmaid's Tale, among many others that are a must-watch).
The words of Grandma Muriel (played by veteran actress Anne Reid) of the Lyons family from Manchester made me see that my obsession with refusing to go through the ATMs in question was not unfounded. I was not alone! In passing, it opened a deep reflection in my dear digital nomads at home, who listened astonished to the words of the mater familia of the series.
Change is here and it is unstoppable. It does not necessarily have to be bad if it increases well-being. With the exception, of course, that it means forced unemployment for many people. Every change and technological advance has meant opening new sources of employment, new professional profiles. But what multinationals and capitalism in general cannot pretend is that on top of paying, we have to do the work ourselves at the cash registers. It is the height of sarcasm. They can call me a Luddite or a technophobe, but I don't think that's the case. The debate is how technology helps us to be a more just and welcoming society. It is how technology helps us to improve democracy and not to go from active and empowered citizens (damned trendy word) to obedient consumers.
But what multinationals and capitalism in general cannot pretend is that on top of paying, we have to do the work ourselves at the cash registersJudge Leonard White, who sentences the protagonist in The Bonfire of the Vanitiesof Tom Wolfe, wondered what decency is, and the judge himself answered: "Decency is what our grandmothers have taught us". Well, that's it, the grandmother ofYears and years it gives us the guideline of what decent technological advancement should be for a free and just society. And it is already known that today, a series can do more than all paternal reflections.
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