Habitrail

There’s no point in lying: I like technology. I like it a lot. I’ve had access to e-mail for [long enough to be embarrassing] years and remember when “the internet” was something that only connected geeks at universities to each other.

I like my DVD player and my iPod (OK, I love my iPod with a passion that borders on fetish; why is an entry for later). I wish the industry would settle on a recordable DVD format so I could go out and buy the right box and finally step up to TiVO and not having to deal with which tape contains which episodes of Lost. And if I could get away with it financially I’d buy a new computer every two years the same way some people buy new cars.

I was the kid they built interactive museum displays for in the 1970s, with the buttons and the lights and the things to push to make the kiosk tell you if you knew your history or not. And yes, I can proudly say that I once had time on the mainframe at U.C. Berkeley (reference above: e-mail for long enough to be embarrassing).

All of this is part of the reason why I am so damn ambivalent about the self-check out stations that are appearing at big box (Target, Home Depot) and grocery stores in my area.

They’re gadgets all right, with the scanner and the scale and the touch pad to enter your “bonus card” number if you’re like me and you leave the bonus card in the checkbook or some other obscure place. The self-checkout station at the grocery store have an incredibly small footprint, maybe four feet on a side, nice LCD screens, scales and scanners at various heights recognizing that people come in all different sizes.

What they don’t recognize is that people don’t want to bend all the way over and pick all of their groceries up off the ground in order to run them by the scanner, and that when one bag is full the idea of putting it on the floor is, well, sorta repulsive when you consider what they actually use to mop the floor in most commercial establishments.

Essentially, there’s no place to put the hand basket that you are most likely using if you’ve resorted to the self checkout station and if you have items that require more than one bag, well, tough. Unless, of course, you’ve used the self checkout that has the belt like the regular checkout.

Theoretically there will be a bagger at the end of the belt packaging up your items for you to take away (after all, baggers are cheaper than cashiers and keep the payroll down). In practice you need to think ahead to make sure your 2 liter of carbonated beverage doesn’t crush your bunch of bananas as there will be no bagger at the end and you’ll have to do it yourself after you’ve finished scanning and paying. And, quite possibly, you’ll have to dodge the items belonging to the person behind you to do it because once you’ve started scanning the damn machine demands that you put the items on the belt and starts it running no matter what since there’s no sensor at the end to tell it that, no, really, there are items already down there waiting to be bagged and maybe, just maybe, it ought to run the belt, say, half-way down and then stop so the person who just paid has time to bag her items before other stuff gets there.

This is the reason I think engineers and MBAs should be required to use every single item they would like to put into play in a public arena. Perhaps then they would see the little things that annoy those of us who have to use these fixtures on a regular basis (tell me why, someone, if 90% or so of the world is right handed it would ever be a good idea to put the little machine through which you swipe your credit card on the right side of the platform on which you are supposed to balance your check book to write your check if you’re paying by bank draft? (if I’m right handed, my right hand needs to go somewhere as I write, right?)) Believe it or not, there are entire associations (here, here, and here) devoted to the design and development of these horrible machines. So why don’t they work better

I include the MBAs in this because, frankly, I find self checkout machines insulting. Am I getting a discount on my purchases for doing a job that the store is too cheap to pay a cashier to do? No, I am not, yet they cleverly trade on the time myth (i.e.: that you will “save time” by doing this) but the reality is that the machines are so regimented and persnickety that when interacting with a human being who hasn’t been trained to use the machine, one who is already frustrated by lack of customer service and random non-availability of items at the type of store likely to have one of these machines, that more often than not they require some sort of human intervention by someone who has a special card to scan and reset the machine when it gets flustered. So, basically, when the machine goes into panic mode you stand around waiting for someone to show up and help you anyway saving absolutely no time whatsoever.

Don’t you just love the way corporate America is pushing more and more of its business responsibilities off onto the consumer yet continuing to raise prices? Like I said, the revolution happened, it just happened in :60 bites and we did not win.