This is neither an apology nor a vote of confidence, but rather a reminder that the truth often lays somewhere between doom and utopian prospects.

Case in point: I was scanning my groceries the other day, standing at one of those self service checkout machines—the kind that asks you to take over the job of a cashier for a few minutes and inventory all the items in your basket so that you can pay the correct amount and leave the store in continued good standing of your role as a dutiful consumer.

Self-checkouts are a strange sort of microcosm of modern technological job destruction and an example of how things never really pan out how we think they will.

My anecdotal experience of the matter though is hardly proof positive of failure, and I don’t think they have flopped—not by any useful measure. But they are certainly not the utopian wonder of techno-frictionless shopping experiences we were made to envision.

First of all, they often flail and flop because they expect us to act like machines, too, performing validated steps in precise orders and without distraction. Ha. 

Also, so paranoid are many retailers of theft, it seems, that many of the self checkouts I’ve encountered lately are overly sensitive, hidden behind security gates, or out and out manned by employees “helping you” do their job.  

The single example of a previously unconsidered benefit of self checkout I can think of has probably been at gas stations where (locally at least) mandates and regulations have forced all retailers to have pre-payment thus drastically reducing the incidence of fill-and-flee.

(But I digress. Yikes!)

Self checkouts were one of those waves of technology-meets-casual labour problems that we doom-and-gloomed as foretelling the end of retail workers: and it hasn’t… because the robots taking our jobs didn’t pan out how we thought it would. 

Our humanity got in the way. It always does.