Self-Checkout Kiosk: Technological Convenience or Customer’s Unpaid Labour?

No free lunch

Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash

“That little fork in the floor — screens on one side, a person on the other — has become one of the everyday places where we decide how much work, how much watching, and how little conversation we’re willing to accept in exchange for speed.” — Kat Hong, upworthy.com

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“Nothing is free in life” is a truism we often ignore, until the hidden costs stare at us later.

Standing in a grocery checkout line can sometimes test our patience. The pattern keeps repeating itself. The person in front of us always has a full cart. The line we choose moves slower than the one we ignore. The cashier takes their own time to serve the customers.

Would you seize the opportunity to bypass the line if given a chance, like serving yourself before a kiosk?

Many grocery chains have installed self-service kiosks, ostensibly to expedite customer checkout.

Are retailers so generous that they value our time?

This upworthy.com article examines the psychology of people who choose to skip the self-service kiosk and prefer to stand in the long winding line to be served by a human cashier.

The people who avoid the machine are not naive. Nor are they technologically challenged. They have valid reasons for choosing the “pain” of waiting to be served rather than opting for the machine’s assistance.

The skippers value the importance of weak ties in building connection and emotional satisfaction. Weak ties are connctions with acquaintances who are not close relationships but those we interact with in daily life. The cashier is a source of a weak connection, but important for social bonding and feeling valued.

For the retailers, self-checkout kiosks pose challenges like theft. Every customer who uses the kiosk is a potential shoplifter. So they install cameras to monitor the customers. Customers who avoid the machines say they value their privacy. They don’t like electronic sueveillance that includes facial recognition software.

Cost cutting is the real reason for installing self-service machines. Customer convenience seems to be an afterthought. Shoppers who refuse to use the machines feel they are doing their part to help preserve human jobs.

Self-service is doing unpaid labour that includes packing and billing that are usually done by humans. In the name of providing conveninece, retailers are making shoppers work without compensation.

Self-checkout kiosks are not necessarily bad. They provide a choice, which the customers can avail or skip.

As long as some customers prefer human service, however slow or inefficient it may be, we can rest assured that machines will never entirely replace the retail human workforce.

Thanks for reading!

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