Talk Back: Self-checkouts do the hokey pokey
Some people are always in a rush. Scurrying this way and that, constantly telling anyone who will listen how late they are for whatever it is they’re supposed to be doing, only to eventually keel over from exhaustion. We, on the other hand, are much more calm and sedate. Why just the other day, we spent about 15 months waiting patiently behind the guy ahead of us — his grocery cart piled high with perishables — while he rang up a tab of $982.
And 48 cents.
Since we were only buying a solitary egg — so we’d have something to scribble on with our dried-out pink and green Sharpies for Easter — you might think the holdup would have left us in a rotten mood. Quite the opposite. We were downright giddy. Since the bean counters figure the average person spends about 5 years of his or her life standing in line, accounting for 25 percent of that in one fell swoop was pretty cool.
It gave us a lot more time for having fun.
It turns out the average person spends about one-third or his or her lifespan — that’s 26 years give or take — sleeping. Then there’s another 11 that’s dedicated to gainful employment — maybe more if you’re a workaholic — the six years it takes to chow down whenever you’re hungry, and four more keeping the house all spic and span. And by the time you’ve thrown in two years watching what’s playing at the cinema, the year it takes to find everything that’s gone missing, and 15 months answering the call of nature — yes, somebody with a stopwatch is actually keeping tracking of that — there’s barely time left for making out your bucket list.
Or using the self-checkout lane.
You see, a funny thing happened on the way to the cash register. The same big-shot retailers who padded their Cayman Island vacation accounts by hornswoggling the gullible public into becoming de facto store employees finally took a gander at their balance sheets and were shocked to discover they were the ones getting bamboozled instead. And all because those ungrateful little so-and-so’s they’d hoodwinked into pulling cashier duty for free had the nerve to do their swiping the old-fashioned way.
Five-finger discount style.
How do you like them apples? Here millions of considerate undercover bosses had gone and dropped 125 grand on each four-pack of do-it-yourself payment terminals — because nobody wants to be waited on hand and foot anymore — and what kind of thanks do they get in return? Twenty percent of millennials and nearly a third of Gen Z users acting like it’s National Everything is Free Today Day. Because food, water, and health care goods are too essential to their well-being to ever have to be paid for.
Hence wholesale changes are now being made.
Places with bulls-eye emblems are restricting self-checkouts to shoppers with 10 items or less while dollar stores have begun shutting them down completely. Still others, in true P.T. Barnum fashion, are granting rush-hour access only to those enrolled in their subscription club. Because if you have to drop a C-note for the privilege, it’s gotta be good. Sigh. McBean was right.
You can’t teach a Sneetch.
Those critters are everywhere — rushing pell-mell through the star-on, star-off machines. Installing flowerboxes one day — that’s how you save downtown Adrian — then tearing them out the next because bike lanes are even better. And in between, they’re down at Wally-World and Dollar$ R Us doing the Curly Checkout Shuffle. But It’s not their fault. They’re only fulfilling their constitutional obligation.
Spending seven years of their lives wasting time.
— Talk Back with Doug Spade and Mike Clement is heard every Saturday morning from 9 a.m. to noon Eastern Time at localbuzzradio.com, Facebook Live and dougspade.com.
This article originally appeared on The Holland Sentinel: Talk Back: Self-checkouts do the hokey pokey
