Is Our Self-Service Economy a Good Thing?
However, there is another side to self-service that actually impoverishes commerce and culture. Self-service is not all it appears to be.
Psychologically, the individualist finds it difficult to ask help from another because to do so implicitly recognizes one’s dependency, which all individualists abhor.
An excellent piece. One day it occurred to me that the reason I was attracted to self-serve was because it appealed to my introverted tendency to isolate myself from others. So I stopped, and have even learned to chat with checkout personnel like a normal person. It’s fun. Plus they need the jobs. Self-serve pretends to give us what we want, but really it just makes things cheaper for the owners.
In my local department store, they recently instituted four self-service check-outs supervised by one cashier. It is, of course, a move for cost-reduction (saving the company three cashiers). It is relatively easy and quick to process through the new section, but most of the customers I have seen will shun the area, preferring to wait in a long line than use the machines. Ours is a relatively small town, and most of the customers know most of the cashiers by name. And prefer to deal with people they know than a flatscreen.
In a smaller, non-department store where I used to shop, they person at the counter got to know my habits, and would often recommend a new item based on knowledge of me. Online attempts to do this with an algorithm spectacularly fail.
In a study done back in the ’50’s, baby chimps were given real mothers to nurse them, robots covered with fur, and metallic robots. The babies which had the naked robots, if surviving, were noted for having many personality disorders, depression, belligerence, and frenzied self-loathing (as exemplified by their behaviors). The ones with the faux-fur mamas did better. Of course, those raised with interaction from another living being did best.
The popularity of Cold Mountain and the Harry Potter series may support this essay. Since I read little of the first, because it insufferably unpleasant, and only a few pages of the first book in the second, because the writer was so ham-fisted, I won’t go under oath. Contempt seems to characterize the first, and solipsism the second.
All very true. In particular, regarding relationships between customers and companies, the loss of any positive feeling towards the seller reminds me of a scene in an old B&W movie where the character says, “I’ll drop you like a hot potato.” The “bottom-line Charlies” have difficulty with the less tangible human factors like company loyality. Both the buyer and the seller suffer in many ways under such conditions.
THOMAS JEFFERSON for the prosecution; “From 1793 to 1797 I remained closely at home. saw none but those who came here, and at length became very much sensible of the ill effect it had on my own mind….I felt enough of the effect of withdrawing from the world then, to see that it left an antisocial and misanthropic state of mind, which severely punished him who gives in to it. And it will a lesson I never shall forget as to myself.