Yes, I do have occasion to get myself out and away of my NJ environs (although why anybody would really want to, save for a vacation or two, is beyond me) which saw me happen into a Loews in PA over the weekend. Usual stuff you’d expect in the store, pretty much on par with Home Depot…although, things were a lot less orange. But what I noticed (and you see above) was an enormously long line of customers waiting to check-out at the self-service check area. Yes, I have seen this before and have ranted aplenty about it over what I encounter at my local NJ Home Depot, as much as at my Stop & Shop. It seems, in their wish to provide a ‘better’ customer check-out experience (or just cut their cashier staff) these stores are creating even longer lines and confusion, and in offering up very few, if none at all, flesh-and-blood cashiers, no alternative to the self-check.
‘So, it goes,’ in the immortal words of old Kurt V.
This illustrates my general gripe with how we have allowed technology to infiltrate out lives in the modern world; it’s not so much the tech that I abhor (although, I surely do hate a lot of it and will go to my grave declaring that social media has been the ruin of modern society) but the fact that when we all come to rely on technology and there is no backup plan to it, when that technology goes awry (or undergoes a little shutter or stutter step) there is going to come chaos.
And come, it often does.
Look, I know I’m an old guy. I realize this isn’t really my world or culture anymore. I know the stores I just mentioned don’t much care if I shop in them or not. And really, hoping for a cashier that’s not waylaid by the tech of their cell phone instead of sufficiently checking me out, is a dream that will never come true. But you get my point, don’t ya?
I have a buddy who runs a very successful insurance agency. He has told me time and again that he is in the technology business, but he just happens to sell insurance. But even in his day-to-day where he relies on and uses technology as much as he does, he makes it a point that anyone who calls into his office is greeted by a live human being, and nobody stays on hold for long. Additionally, in what I feel is a brilliant move, the first agent who answers the call makes sure to get a minimum of customer info from the caller, so when that caller is handed down to an agent to help them, that agent has that customer’s info up on their screen already. There is none of that, “Can you give me your account number, please?” bs I get asked again and again during the same service call when I am inevitably bounced down the line to people who supposedly will help me.
Or I can’t understand because their accent is too thick (a complaint for another time, certainly).
We have become so reliant on our tech that we have forgotten, or our skills have atrophied on how to perform simple tasks or even communicate when suddenly the tech flutters or goes down completely (take what just happened over the weekend at the airports). Or we don’t have systems in place where we can deal with the public to satisfy two ways of doing something. Like the bunch o’ ladies in my local Dunkin scrambling to fill app orders but not having the time, skill or whatever else it takes to man the store’s walk-up counter leaving a line of costumers wagging out the door of the shop.
Look, my time’s not valuable in the grand scheme. I admit that. I’m a nobody, going nowhere fast, as I always have been (and revel in that fact actually). My life on this great green ball is pretty much done. I figure I have a good thirty years or so (yes, my relatives live that long) to slide slowly into home. I’m not making any big waves (not that I ever did), so I can be inconvenienced more than most. I have the patience of whatever saint you believe in. I don’t as much get aggravated by all this as I just shake my head in disbelief (or snap a cell phone pic) at all this happening in front of me, as it is happening in front of us all, that we simply accept this lot in life now.
Enoy the devolution my little droogs.
