Looks like impulse item purchases are down at grocery stores due the the rise of the automated checkout. Apparently, the grocers have yet to figure out how to tap into the market for impulse purchases in a part of the store more or less defined by the absence of time spent standing around waiting to pay for your stuff.

As wrist-slitting, defenestrating, head-in-ovening tragedies go for me, this isn’t. I am an avid consumer of neither impulse items nor atuomated checkstands at grocery stores. The former because I rarely find myself in dire need of a butane lighter, sugar-free gum or “Ten Tips To Drive Your Man Wild In Bed”; the latter because I think they’re evil. Eeeeeeviiiilllll.

Look, it should be pretty obvious to anyone who knows me that I am not, by any means, a technophobe. (And if you require proof, might I submit the following: after perhaps a maximum of ten hours in my company during our recent sojourn to Hawaii, my ten-year-old niece Caitlin felt it necessary to produce the following illustration of her take on the relationship between myself, my wife and my laptop. Cute kid. :roll:) I have absolutely no problem with technology in general, or automation in particular. For instance: I am more than happy to receive phone calls from robots letting me know that my mail-order prescriptions shipped or when the guys from Sears are going to be bringing the new stove. That’s good automation. That’s automation that works for me. And yes, it’s unfortunate that a living human being most likely has been kicked out of a job because a computer can do it for less, but let’s face it; automation by its very nature takes jobs from humans, and does so in proportion to the evolving sophistication and reliability of said technology. (Hell, at least someone still has to be paid to maintain the phone robots. 😉 )

But the atuo-checkout stands at the grocery store are of another order entirely. They use technology to allow me to do someone else’s work for them, someone who would otherwise have to be hired by the store. That pisses me off. It’s one thing to allow a machine to call me up and tell me when my Lipitor will be arriving; it’s another thing entirely to allow a machine to give me on-the-job training as a bag boy. I feel I have a sufficiently broad range of skills already, thank you. I don’t think of my time in line at the QFC as an opportunity for an inspiring “If you give a man a bag of groceries, you feed him for a day; if you teach a man to bag groceries you feed him for life” kind of moment.

I used to only use the automated checkout at stores I didn’t like, where I had only run in because I more or less had to and couldn’t care less wether the the store continued to exist or not, much less whether the carbon units who worked there managed to keep their jobs. But lately I’ve found that even limited exposure to these horrid things is unacceptable. I hate everything about them, from the philoshopy behind them to the cheap, somehow clinical feel of standing in a line waiting to supplicate myself before an altar of greasy plastic and painted aluminum. I can’t help but thinking that, if this trend continues, in five years I’ll be standing in front of a similar machine in the waiting room of my doctor’s office, preparing myself to receive my first automated colo-rectal exam. “Please turn your back to the screen, bend over at the waist and spread your buttocks,” the prim mechanical female voice will say. *Shudder*

So if impulse-item-promoting technology fails to catch up with the rest of the system and people fail to balance the savings in labor with increased sales of Tic Tacs and National Enquirers, I will be the first to applaud. Perhaps I will call QFC’s customer comment line personally and let them know how I feel about it. Of course, I’ll have to leave a voice mail.