Glad to be of service

"Do you want to try it?"

I couldn't believe my ears. My mother, who is at an age when people start to fear change, was inviting me to do something new.

We were at a large supermarket in Pittsburgh, standing in front of 20 checkout counters, four or five of which were staffed. The lines were fairly long, so she suggested we try the new automated checkout system instead.

"Automated" is perhaps not the right word, since we had to do the work ourselves. We took each item out of our shopping cart and placed it on a scanner, where a laser read its bar code.

Next to the scanner were a couple of hooks over which we placed a plastic bag. Each item went into the bag. So far, so good — except that the system weighed the bag to determine whether or not we were cheating. Sometimes it didn't notice that we had added something, and asked us to scan it again.

When we were ready to pay, the system wouldn't recognize Mom's credit card. After the third try, it called a human over to sort things out.

It alarmed me to realize that people are now taking orders from robots; but what also bothered me was that we were not given a reward (other than the purely theoretical time savings) for doing someone else's work.

I had been curious to try this system the same way I'd been curious when gas stations introduced self-service aisles in the 1970s. You could save a dollar if you did the work of the gas-station attendant, who used to be called a "service-station attendant" because he'd clean your windows and check your oil while pumping your gas.

Much of my life has been about trying to save a dollar, so I can understand that costs and prices have to be kept low. But what happened was that after a few years, all the aisles became self-service aisles, and all but one of the attendants at each gas station lost their jobs.

This is about to happen to supermarkets, but I don't want it to — particularly not in America, where they have one person to ring up your groceries and another to pack your bags. These days, I'm happy to pay someone to perform a service. Not only do you feel like a king; you're helping people without skills to stay employed.

Think about it: if they're out of work, they're going to get your dollar or your euro anyway, through your taxes. Why not get something in return?