Scourge of robots at check-out

It's not so often these days that a headline makes you happy.

I mean, hate to say so as a longtime hard news guy, but

I've certainly stopped reading beyond the headlines of a lot of Gaza war stories in the papers.

It's not that you can put your head in the sand about the Mideast, or the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the coming winter of fighting there in the frozen mud, or the dire wolf who is the likely Republican candidate for president, or the excruciating yet boring — been there, was repelled by that — campaign over the next year against the likely Democratic candidate.

Anyway, the happy hed — that's ancient newspaperese — in question was “Grocery Chain Closing Self-checkout Lanes,” which caught my eye while I was perusing the Business section of The New York Times one day while eating lunch.

I found it again online, where there is an even happier hed: “A Grocery Chain Just Fired Its Self-Checkouts,” with the sweet sub-hed: “They're bringing the humans back.”

I mean, hallelujah, right?

It's hard enough to hit the supermarket after a long day of pounding our keyboards, to lay in provisions for the family, loading the shopping cart with wildly and increasingly expensive foodstuffs — “Wait, that bag of granola is suddenly $12.99?” — without having to then do more hard work ourselves by dragging everything under the scanner to get a price and then having some AI-happy machine yell at you about where you are placing the cloth bag you had to lug from home.

And so confusing. The other day, almost everything I had was scannable, in bags and boxes, but I'd also grabbed a sweet little Japanese eggplant, which was somehow grown in the field and come to market without having a bar code embedded in its smooth aubergine skin. I had no idea what to do. I was stalled.

I started muttering to the vegetable, asking what its code might be, when a friendly grocery clerk overheard me, and came to the rescue, as he did have the four-digit number for Japanese eggplants memorized, and after punching it in, he also showed me how to weigh it and get a price.

But that's a problem, too, the main one for me in this whole self-checkout business. The whole purpose to these infernal self-checkout machines is for the boss man to make the jobs of checkout clerks redundant, unnecessary. And so here was this guy helping me put himself and his colleagues out of work. I find the whole thing sickening.

No more pleasant musing about the weather, no more heading on purpose to the line of the clerk who has been at your same local store for decades, even when her line is longer, just because you like having a visit with her. The robot cares not for small talk. And if it did, that would be even creepier.

The problem, as I saw when I actually read the story, by Claire Moses, was in its lede (more journo spelling, that): “Booths, a small chain that has sold groceries in northern England since 1847 ... announced this week that it will be getting rid of the self-checkouts in all but two of its 28 stores. They're bucking a trend that has remade retail shopping around the world over the last 20 years.”

I do essentially none of my grocery shopping in northern England, so this properly reactionary move is going to help me out not a whit. But perhaps there is some hope, Stateside. “In September, Wal-Mart told Insider that it would remove the lanes from a handful of stores, though it did not say why,” Moses reports. I also do essentially none of my grocery shopping at Wal-Mart, but these things have a way of spreading.