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The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.
Congratulations on your part-time job! Please report to the nearest grocery store, scan your weekly essentials, move them to the doll-sized bagging area, and prepare to be gaslit by the robot voice insisting that you better place that item in the bagging area.
Just to be clear, I already did.
At some point in the process, you likely will need to call in reinforcements from a fellow grocery worker—the one with an actual badge. “Help is [allegedly] on the way,” the machine assures you. We have officially nullified the “self” in “self-checkout.” Now, it’s time for a real human interaction—but the two clerks in charge of an area with 20 machines are busy helping everyone else besieged by what I would like to suggest is one of the worst technological “innovations” of the last few decades. (Yes, I understand the competition is stiff: social media or fast fashion, for instance. Those ugly shoes with the individual toes…)
The limited staff, theoretically, is there to ensure that you are old enough to buy wine and that you scanned that peanut butter instead of slipping it unobtrusively into your bag. But they’re usually too busy making all the machines shut up and stop flashing lights to have the time to check.
At least they’ll get minimum wage for it. Your role as a self-checkout scanner comes with no compensation or benefits. Unless you count the CCTV security footage of yourself from the worst possible angle as a perk, the most you will receive are a cascade of error messages and mounting frustration.
As Amanda Mull pointed out in a 2023 Atlantic article, these kiosks initially were advertised as a win-win for grocers and customers: Grocers would be able to cut back and pay fewer cashiers, and customers could avoid long lines.
Sure, scanning machines can’t call in sick, and while family emergencies do not interrupt their productivity, plenty of tech outages do. And about all those potential time savings? The opposite is true. Most of us aren’t professional cashiers. We haven’t mastered the mysteries of bar code placements, nor have we memorized produce SKUs. Plus, we can’t check our own IDs. Stacking up a week’s worth of scanned groceries Tetris-style in the tiny space allotted is yet another time suck.
Please don’t misunderstand! I would love to contribute to improved employment conditions for overworked, underpaid grocery staff. Plus, it might translate to lower food prices based on lower overhead costs. But it definitely doesn’t seem as though self-service benefits the staff. We’re not freeing up cashiers for cart-return duty, restocking, and general customer service. Instead, there are simply fewer cashiers to deal with the work. Corporations are quick to blame the dearth of employees on talent shortages and pressure for increased wages; they’ll be less likely to mention their market consolidation and year-over-year increases in net profit.
According to CBS, 67 percent of shoppers agree that self-checkout systems leave much to be desired. I’d like to start a petition to transfer these machines back to the dystopia from which they came. Unfortunately, but unsurprisingly, self-checkout machines are unable to process returns.
