Why not do it yourself? At Stop-and-Shop you have that option thanks to the chipper self-checkout machines. No more standing in line behind a full shopping cart, instead you can zip through. But while these machines may be convenient and cool they have hidden drawbacks that few realize.
A supermarket strike in Southern California has 70,000 people walking the picket line. And although, this strike has relatively little to do with self-checkout machines, Greg Deneier, a spokesman for the United Food and Commercial Workers union was quoted in the Los Angeles Times as saying, “It’s a threat [self-checkout machines].0 In the long run there [will] be fewer and fewer jobs, particularly at the cashier level, which is one of the best-paying jobs in the store.”
So when you zip through at a kiosk you may potentially be taking a person’s job in the long run. Self-checkouts are very efficient and besides initial cost, of about $80,000, they are also cheap. Machines need no health benefits or salary, and according to an industry expert they pay for themselves in a year to a year and a half.
Your average checkout cashier makes in the range of $20,000 to $40,000 a year plus benefits. By slowly whittling down the amount of humans checking out customers at stores, a company can save a tremendous amount of money formerly devoted to labor.
Francesca O’Brien ’06 summed up what her group of friends thought of the issue, “If it comes down to the fact that people are going to start losing jobs then I’m strongly against it.”
FUSA President Kevin Neubauer had similar thoughts with respect to the issue, “While I usually do anything I can to leave the grocery store as fast as possible, I’m concerned that the automatic checkout machines are taking good jobs away from good people.”
Self-checkouts are just another step in the long march toward automation of the service industry. We bank not through tellers, but through ATMs. And rail or plane tickets are often spit out of a machine instead of handed to us from a person.
The fact is that we, as a nation, cannot afford this incredible loss of low-to-mid level jobs. Cashiers and ticket agents all contribute to both our economic well-being and our social fabric. Maybe the economy has recovered, at least according to the Republicans, but the jobs have yet to materialize.
Companies are growing their bottom lines by cutting the workforce. The time is now to choose whether we want the cold, inhuman world of full automation or a job landscape rich in diversity and accessible to all. This is one instance where we really can make a difference. Choose a person not a machine.
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