I don’t know, Barney, I rather like the idea of doing things by myself, rather than rely on somebody else.
I'm pretty do-it-yourself but that doesn't mean that I'm about to tolerate having stores unload their work onto me.
It is the wave of the future, Barney. Computers are taking over everywhere, what makes you think that people will be able to rest the self check outs in the stores?
Take secretaries: the computer was supposed to reduce workload. What it did was increase workload by burdening one person with other people's responsibilities. The effect being that the other workers in the chain would get fired and the secretary would end up having to stay late just to get everything done.
Don't get me wrong, I'm really interested in automation in industrial applications but this is a society, not a science project. Your fellow citizen's well-being is at stake here.
The problem is that as long as a person's well-being is dependent on income, and income is dependent on employment, then automation cannot progress without serious consequences to society.
Legislation concerning limits on actual physical/mental exertion levels of employees would do a lot to alleviate this (max. hours per week does prevent 'forced' overtime but it doesn't prevent the employer packing as much workload into those hours--which actually increases exertion for the employee). It's just that there are few government standards for health, so it's difficult to set such limits.
Any trend can be stopped but companies realize that much of this population is willing to put up with unjustified reduction in quality of service without a fight and so they know they can get away with this stuff. It happens at every level of the private and--truly humiliating--the public sector. This is just one example.
And just how is going to strike over this? If supermarket checkers go on strike, wouldn’t that actually speed up the automation process, lead to even more self check outs?
Unions could make the case that employers are violating their contracts (i.e. deliberately manipulating customers in order to get out of their employment obligations). When there's a strike, just getting into the store is a nasty experience. (Granted, people can be so selfish here that they're actually capable of cheering when strikers get mowed down.)
Many times that is not possible, it is human nature to take out one’s frustrations on somebody else.
Yeah but there's a big difference between someone who's just having a bad day and someone who makes a habit of being an a-hole.
I won't even clean up my table at McDonald's I certainly wouldn't use a self serve till.
I'm conflicted with the fast-food table clearing thing: on the one hand I want to clear the table so the cleaning person's job is less icky. On the other, the theory is that if you leave enough mess, people will complain and the company will have to hire an adequate number of cleaning personnel. Thing is, people don't complain which means that if I leave a mess, it'll just sit there. And I can't stand getting a dirty table. The self-serve thing is easier because it just requires the customer to not use the SS.
SirJoe, maybe you need to think about all the computer tech's that simply cannot find work for a couple of reasons. First, there are too many of them and next, too many people know how to repair their own.
This is the thing: automation/computerization tends to create job saturation faster than the low-tech alternative (i.e. more jobs are ultimately lost than are created). The idea of the assembly-line worker just being retrained as a technician when the replaced with a robot arm is a myth IMO. That and you can't expect large wads of the population to put their lives on hold and re-train whenever companies decide that it's time for a change that just serves to save them money without actually benefiting their clients. I mean, people give up their labour to employers precisely so that they can dedicate less time to making money and more to other aspects of life. Society cannot accept employers just disrupting this whenever they feel the urge.
Sure there are always areas that are completely new and create more jobs without job loss (that doesn't mean you don't get saturation when to many people feed into it), but this is about automating things things that a) already work and b) replacing them with lower quality alternatives.
When the unemployment numbers reach staggering proportions these businesses that are laying off employees are going to find their customer base deminishing as well.
That's the flip side yes. People sometimes fail to realize that this is a market system and anything that affects sellers in one area will affect buyers in another. Especially so with necessities (i.e. like buying food at the supermarket).
I'm not sure that creating a job just for the sake of creating a job works either. In many cases I think it just leads to more bureaucracy, not to mention higher prices for the consumer.
You 100% right about that. But this is not the case here. These jobs are actually
needed in order to maintain the same level of quality; self-serve tills cannot effectively replace cashiers (until you develop robot arm systems that can do all the scanning and bagging--and even then you won't have the "human touch" mentioned earlier).
Why go to a self serve gas station when the full serve across the street is the same price?
Just remember to tip. ;-) (Especially on those bloody frigid days.)
