Press One for Anger: Self-Service and the Decline of Customer Satisfaction.
Why are we often less satisfied with the more technology we add?
Photo by GENERAL BYTES on Unsplash
When self-checkout kiosks first invaded American supermarkets several years ago, they were introduced and advertised as marvels of efficiency. The promise was a shopper's utopia: you, the customer, could zip through the checkout line, bypass idle chit-chat with teenage cashiers, and seize control of the entire transaction. In reality, however, the experience is an intricate dance of frustration. We must now navigate a maze of barcodes, bagging areas, and blinking error messages. I despise these things and refuse to use them.
Initially, the idea was a good one: the business could free store employees from the monotony of scanning groceries, allowing them to focus on customer service. Yet, we often encounter a solitary employee burdened with the task of overseeing an army of temperamental machines. This employee—usually exuding thinly veiled impatience—must bounce from kiosk to kiosk, troubleshooting everything, but was there ever an increase in customer service? Have you ever tried to find a helpful employee on the floor of any store recently? If you could find someone, were they helpful, or did they point to aisle 473 and tell you to find your item there?
Customer service is even worse on the telephone. When you call a business nowadays, you're immediately funneled into a labyrinthine automated system—press one for this, press two for that, three for something else. It feels like an endless loop where understanding is a one-way street. If you're navigating a website, you're often greeted first by a chatbot, another form of artificial "assistance" that rarely gets it right the first time. After surmounting these digital hurdles, you finally reach an actual human being—only to be asked to regurgitate all the information you've just painstakingly input.
Your initial level of patience, let's say starting at a nine, has already plummeted to a four. And heaven help you if they decide you need to be transferred to another department. By the time you're shuttled off to the next representative, your patience gauge is firmly in the red, teetering on the edge of a full-blown meltdown. At this point, customer frustration often combusts into outright rage and abusive behavior. Your emotional reservoir is not just empty; it's now running on a deficit for many. I usually scream "REPRESENTATIVE!!!" repeatedly and then give up.
Back to the useless self-checkout lines. Contrary to the illusion of automation, self-checkout machines are not labor-saving devices; they merely outsource labor from employees to consumers. The customer now juggles the roles of cashier, bagger, and even troubleshooter when the machine inevitably throws a tantrum. Scanning and bagging an entire week's worth of groceries turns into Herculean labor, one plagued with scanning errors, limited bagging space, and arbitrary payment restrictions.
These self-service systems only sometimes offer an economic advantage for the company's shareholders. One staff member can now supervise up to ten machines, drastically slashing labor costs. But despite the reduction in payroll, are you, the customer, seeing corresponding drops in grocery prices? And let's not forget the loss of jobs, which has ramifications that cascade through individual lives and communities. I understand how technology will eliminate jobs occasionally, and we all have to adjust, but I'm still grappling with how these machines are helping society at large.
There may be one group of consumers they seem to help - criminals. Self-checkout machines are also an unintentional invitation to theft. One might argue that these "shrinkages" are simply the cost of doing business, but it's a cost often passed down to the consumer, affecting us all.
Beyond the economic costs, there's a concerning invasion of privacy. Self-checkouts frequently come equipped with surveillance cameras that record your every move. Yes, conventional wisdom tells us we're under surveillance when we enter a store, but the additional scrutiny at these kiosks makes even innocent customers feel like suspects.
Are these machines really efficient? Even if you're a master of the self-checkout, you often need to flag down that annoyed attendant for age verification or to rectify silly scanning errors. During peak hours, these minor hitches seem to compound, creating a bottleneck that frustrates customers waiting behind you and staff helping the other self-checkout customers who can't figure things out.
Don't forget what has also been lost - the simple exchange between customer and cashier. We supposedly live in a post-pandemic era of loneliness that many often describe as an epidemic - one that was exacerbated by years of social distancing. Eradicating such minor interactions feels like a further descent into societal disconnect.
I would love to see an end to self-checkouts in retail stores. We need a minor revolt against a system that, under the guise of convenience, alienates workers, compromises privacy, and saddles customers with unnecessary burdens. The self-checkout kiosk may be an inescapable sign of the times, but it's one that deserves serious reconsideration, if not our outright avoidance.
Clayton Craddock is a devoted father of two, an accomplished musician, and a thought-provoker dedicated to Socratic questioning, challenging the status quo, and encouraging a deeper contemplation on a range of issues. Subscribe to Think Things Through HERE, and for inquiries and to connect, email him here: Clayton@claytoncraddock.com.
The social ineptitude of a lot of people these days, leads me to believe that we're going to see a lot more self-checkouts. And what is bizarre is that some of the employees at these establishments seem to be oblivious to the fact that their job-description responsibilities are shrinking. It's not unusual to walk into a store and see 8 checkouts with one open, such as tocanal the customers toward the automated checkouts. Typical management mischief.
Ever since witnessing the misbehavior and anti-social chaos of the first 'gas lines' in California during the OPEC crises of the 1970s, I have been at a loss to grasp why such an intricate global system of goods and services which relies so heavily on the powers of large institutions (and can count so little on the accountable behavior of individuals) hasn't broken down beyond repair long since.
In today's ultra-tech world, where the social contract and the rule of law have already been so irreversibly displaced by the rule of devices and the increasing suspicion and avoidance of interactions with anyone outside one's own closed circle of relatives and colleagues, this sense I have lived with for so long, that the entire project of 'globalization' is a more fragile house of cards than anyone dares admit, just becomes stronger with each passing day.
While I still see the same essential sources of bad behavior now as back then, amounting usually to little more than someone having encountered some irritating obstacle to having what they want when they want it, I also see that the proliferation of more and more such potential obstacles has been the mass unintended consequence of each and every new development of this intensely disappointing Digital Age. (I may have been shortsighted in calling this The Century of Stupid, when much evidence on hand suggests that our particular breed of self-glorified apes was never all that bright, all along.)
Admittedly, I myself live with an elevated sensitivity to various causes for my own reactions of anxiety, which I like to believe are stoked more by encountering the aggressive indifference built into institutional behavior than they are by any risk of my not receiving some form of instant gratification instantly enough.
But in two recent instances this view of my own code of conduct was put to the test, and I cannot claim to have passed without having blown a gasket or two, and then having to spend hours and even days recovering from the trauma induced by my own bad behavior.
One was a month or so back, when the predominant cell-service provider in my region, Verizon, simply lost signal for an entire day. There was not only no one to direct blame upon accurately since nobody around had any clue what was really happening nor why, but also not anyone further away worth talking to, even to inform them that a widespread signal crash across an entire region really was happening when a handful of script-reciting screen-watchers in India passing as 'customer service representatives' hadn't gotten the memo that it was happening at all. I won't spell out here what the last words were that I uttered to one of these hapless clowns when I finally did make contact, but its initials were 'GFY', a manner of speaking I would never dream of using on anyone face to face, no matter how much they may have inconvenienced me....
The other was when I had chosen to wait until the last day I had been told was the day before it would be too late to update my information with my state's healthcare bureaucracy, Soonercare, and called them on that day to find out what it was they wanted from me so I could continue to rest assured that my social security number alone might be enough to allow me to sit in some waiting room for medical services I have spent a lifetime avoiding by any means necessary, before being informed inevitably that some minuscule box-ticking oversight on my part still had disqualified me from coverage...
Let's just say I didn't manage to hold either tongue or temper very well that day either.
On both occasions, that perfect storm of automated menus added to that reliably bland performative indifference to my humanity I encountered, when I finally did manage to speak to an actual person (always the wrong person in the wrong department, and never having actually opened my repeatedly-disclosed account data to see for themselves who I was or what I was calling about) were all it took for my blood pressure to spike and my long-cultivated adult self-restraint to go fleeing out the nearest window.
The self-replicating non-event now referred to historically as 'during the pandemic' not long ago scared me for much these same reasons, while the threat of actually getting sick from a superbug I remain convinced never even existed never had anything to do with my fears.
It was the potential for mass bad behavior, unleashed by the now-largely-forgotten run in retail stores on toilet paper, which had raised my alarms very early in the history of the most 'viral' rumor yet encountered in the internet age: once again, just as in California in the seventies, I had to ponder just how badly people might behave if no more gas, or toilet paper, ever showed up at all.
Each of these events, and many like them, have caused me to revisit my own anxiety about just how civilized civilization really is.
Such as the time years ago when there was a storm-induced power outage around Denver while I was making my way to the front of a giant grocery retailer, when the lights went off along with every cooler, freezer, cash register, HVAC device and automatic door in the store, and in a matter of minutes tempers were already beginning to flare as the lines up front grew more and more dense and less and less mobile, while a single manager tried with one side of her brain to teach a dozen cashiers on the fly how to do checkouts with handheld calculators, in order to forestall a riot, while arguing with her higher-ups on the long-corded landline phone she held in her other hand....
Call me nihilist, but in these times I see so many potential breakdowns in public order to be induced by even small-scale systemic failures, and even more potential for several of these occurring at once to land us within days in a world with no working communications, no fuel, no consumer goods, no answers, no one taking responsibility much less implementing countermeasures, and very little of the social contract left to rely on as inconvenienced individuals in the face of the unknown.
It seems to me that it is a matter of when, not whether, enough of these various failures of the globalization machinery happening simultaneously will stack up all at once, and put at risk the entirety of centuries' worth of human achievements in building the system we rely on today for no particular reason, other than it seems to be working for the time being, although nobody really knows how or why, and certainly no one will take responsibility for when it no longer does.
And you can call me simplistic or idealistic or even a fanatic all you want, but for all these reasons I have always believed that the most powerful advice ever given on the maintenance of the social contract was written down two thousand years ago:
Love thy neighbor as thyself.
It's easy enough to forget this simple counsel when there is still reason to believe the lights will come back on or the toilet paper aisle will eventually be restocked.
But what happens when they don't?
We still will have each other, but the crucial question facing the human future is mostly about whether we decide to love each other, and express this love actively in terms of mutual cooperation for the solving of difficulties together, or we decide instead to follow the evil examples of aggressive indifference so diligently taught to us by governments and mass corporations for so many generations by now, and set upon each other as nothing more than enemies, out only to cut each others' throats over whatever is left in our purview to fight over.