The Last Page
Mcgrew, Ken
YOU GO SHOPPING and find yourself in a long line, waiting for help from a competent but overwhelmed cashier. On your right you see four self-service stations with no lines. A cashier stands...
...He has you swipe your card yourself before handing it to him...
...Denier put it this way: "They're taking the service out of the service market...
...Let's start by refusing to be trained...
...The loss of these jobs is part of a larger threat...
...Companies claim they are motivated by a desire to speed up transactions for customers...
...As with ATM machines, self-checkout may ultimately expose us to hidden charges and fees...
...He suggested instead motivating people to demand full service when paying full-service prices...
...Increasingly workers at stores like Wal-Mart, he told me, are realizing that it's better to get fired for organizing than to be replaced by a self-service machine...
...I suggested a boycott of self-checkout lanes...
...As it stated in an acquisition release, "Using IBM's global reach, we also will be able to deliver these solutions to retailers around the world...
...As a supervisor at Home Depot told the Athens Banner-Herald, "As soon as we get 'em trained . . . it's gonna roll right along...
...Now, thanks to the North American Free Trade Agreement, the World Trade Organization, and the Clinton and Bush administrations, even the computer jobs are leaving...
...When your turn comes, you tell your friendly cashier that you'd like to pay by credit card...
...The Food Marketing Institute tells me that 29 percent of food stores are using the stations...
...Self-checkout is coming to a store near you...
...The Bureau's Occupational Outlet Handbook states that "electronic commerce will have a limited impact on this large occupation...
...This could change...
...He said that the short-term prospects were very bad, but that in the long term he expected to see workers demanding their rights...
...This shift, from personal service to self-service, from employment for humans to employment for machines, may seem inevitable, but it can be resisted...
...Studies of self-service transactions show that self-service isn't even faster...
...Denier told me that only a few years ago the Bureau of Labor Statistics was reporting "cashier" as the occupation with the best growth...
...However, once we are fully trained we can expect these jobs to decline dramatically...
...I asked Denier how the union viewed the prospects for organizing in these occupations...
...We could develop a new form of protest, the check-in...
...A representative of Home Depot told CNNMoney.com that 30 percent of their sales are already self-checkout...
...IBM sees this as the future of retail...
...He estimated that cashier labor costs are reduced 30 percent to 40 percent at stores with selfcheckout...
...Denier agreed that this approach might appeal to people already sympathetic to the issue of job loss, but thought that the larger public would be less moved by such pleas...
...At first, we were assured that these losses were temporary growing pains of our economy's shift from an industrial to an information base...
...A cashier stands ready to train you on how to scan barcodes...
...We could wear shirts with printed statements such as "Full-service with Full-employment" and form long, winding lines of customers waiting to be helped by a human being...
...For years we've watched good-paying jobs be outsourced or replaced by technology...
...You're still being trained...
...Self-checkout may do for cashier jobs what ATMs and EZ Passes have already done for bank tellers and tollbooth personnel...
...You feel guilty about shopping at a corporate chain in the first place, so you opt to save the cashier's job by waiting...
...KEN MCGREW 112 n DISSENT / Summer 2004...
...I had another suggestion...
...The real motivations, as Greg Denier, director of communications for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union told me, are "to reduce labor costs and eliminate jobs...
...Just swipe your card and go...
...AC Nielsen reported that more than 60 percent of households polled have used the stations...
...Watching your fellow shoppers defect to the self-service stations, you foresee a future with one cashier supervising ten stations...
Vol. 51 • July 2004 • No. 3
