Self-Checkout Serfs

 Yes, I use it. Then, I do not do like some and use it for a cart with a month's worth of supplies. Aldi's is down to one human being working the check-out, and Payless is maybe the same or one more cashier.

To me, it has been the corporations cutting out human employees with those pesky benefits and pay and workmen's comp payments. David Moscrop's The Scourge of Self-Checkout, and see it now as something broader. 

Some days, getting out of a store with any remaining sanity is a tall order. You’re annoyed, nursing an unsettling sense that—beyond the promises of tech purveyors guaranteeing a long healthy life, a self-driving car, and a robo-butler just around the corner—the world was in a kind of death spiral. There’s a term for the steady decline of so many aspects of contemporary life, online and off: enshittification. Coined by author and journalist Cory Doctorow in 2022, it initially referred to a decline in service quality on the part of tech giants who had so thoroughly captured users that they could extract value from them without being sensitive to their preferences or needs. Social media platforms, for example, hoover up your personal data and, in return, fill your timeline with bots and trolls. Or rideshare services gouge you because it’s busy hour and you’ve hit surge pricing, but you have few other options because the apps crushed the taxi industry and public transit sucks.

If nothing else, it might be worse in Canada:

Food giant Loblaw, which has a nearly 30 percent share of the Canadian grocery market, has rolled out an array of sometimes heavy-handed measures to combat what it calls “organized crime.” The beefed-up security can include wheel-locking shopping carts and looming Plexiglas barriers (creating what one user on X called a “jailhouse feel.”) In March, Loblaw also began testing receipt scanners in Ontario. The pilot required shoppers to scan a receipt’s bar code to open a metal gate to let them leave the premises. Consumers immediately hated it, as it led to confusion at the exit, with loud alarms constantly going off. One customer quoted by the CBC said that, at a time of skyrocketing grocery prices, the measures are “just kind of kicking [shoppers] while they’re down.”

This is what unlimited, unregulated capitalism gets you. Stuck -

Doctorow argues for a right of exit—the opportunity for users to easily move from one platform to another to avoid being locked in. That’s a form of competition and consumer power we could apply to the retail consumer market too. But governments aren’t exactly rushing to make this happen—to break apart retail oligopolists, to induce competition, to preserve local shops and small players as an alternative. The upshot is we are citizens of the enshittocene with no clear way out. 

For a slightly different take (or an exposé of its symptoms) see Notes on Self-Checkout: Chocolate & Coffee from Thornfield Hall Blog.

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