In more peaceful times, however, it’s a nice idea to step back and find out what you actually care about, beyond the things you’ve been told you care about. And, if we had, the guys would have risked spending our gap year on our bellies in a rice paddy. I like the idea of gap years between high school and college, though my generation never thought about stepping off the conveyer belt. Speaking of hiring issues, Alex does a nice whiplash gag with these bankers contemplating a sort of gap-year plan that, instead of enhancing the quality of their hires, turns out to be geared towards stamping out their dreams. In other words, self-check doesn’t cost jobs. Otherwise, grocery stores have to take who they can get. It took a couple of years.īring back those nimble, experienced checkers and I’ll go back to using them.īut to do that, you’d have to bring back 7.5% unemployment. But in them-thar days, you started as a bagger and moved up to stocking shelves before you were allowed to be a checker. If you shop the same store regularly, you learn who’s fast and efficient, but those people get bumped up to middle management and only take a shift on the cash register when the store is flooded.ĭagnabbit, I remember the days before self-check and even before scanners, and a woman named Lucy who could hold a friendly conversation while she quickly rang up your groceries. Our roadsides are festooned with help wanted ads, and a store with eight or ten check-out lines rarely has even half of them open.Īs for being in the mood for human interaction, prodigious number of those open lines are staffed by new hires who have enough on their minds just doing the job, never mind interacting with anybody. Heel-dragging Luddites aside, with an unemployment rate of 3.4%, complaining about lost jobs is particularly silly. Not only did we used to rely on bank tellers to cash our checks and service station attendants to pump our gas, but stores once had “shop girls” to fetch things off shelves, rather than grocery carts you filled yourself. The complaint that it takes away jobs, first of all, ignores all the things we do for ourselves. Roz Chast brings up another topic upon which people grouse, but I think the pushback against self-check contains a substantial amount of astroturfing, perhaps from store worker unions.
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