Machines Replacing Cashiers Is Not A Good Thing
I went to Lowe's. I needed a flag pole for an event I'm going to. They had the best deal. After thinking about it for a day I went ahead and made the purchase. It was going to be a quick in and out, but then I got to the cash register. This was a whole other adventure.
They have machines set up there to take your money, and there is no cashier, per se. Lowe's appears to be interested in eliminating humanity and giving you a cold, heartless experience. There's a guy at the front who will help you get situated. But he doesn't wait on you.
We've had this discussion in recent years. It came up with the desire for fast food employees to make $15 an hour and earn a living wage. It seems to me that the people who want their burgers quickly prefer slave labor or kids who will take what they get and like it. I strongly disagree with that mentality.
Minimum wage itself has not gone up with the cost of living, so people are working jobs and getting food assistance from the government. There's something very wrong with that. Anytime people speak out against it, they're told that they don't like the system or any number of stupid excuses.
The $15 cause for fast food employees was met with smart ass remarks about replacing the workers with kiosks. They think they're clever. You'll even see memes where there are kiosks at McDonald's and other places, but these clueless people mocking the fast food employees are missing the real point here.
There's already an agenda in place to eliminate workers entirely. This includes self-driving trucks to bring the food and goods across the country. They want to eliminate as much labor as possible. Once they do that, you're going to have more people sitting idly about, and it's not going to be a Utopia.
It's not going to be a case of people having free time to do all the fun stuff they desire. What people aren't thinking through is what's going to happen to those people once they don't have jobs, but they better think about it. There's a plan in place, and it isn't pretty.
As I was standing there in line, I was making the vow that I won't return to Lowe's if this is the way they check people out. I'll get what I need elsewhere at a place that appreciates humanity a little bit more. A place that will hire a cashier to wait on people.
It isn't that the machinery didn't work efficiently. Sometimes when you put your folding money into that thing, it spits it back out and tells you it can't accept it. My three bills went in easily, and it spit out the coins that I had coming.
For good measure, it had me on camera, letting me know that I was being recorded. So, not only did I have a heartless buying experience from a big corporation, I also was treated somewhat like a criminal. Like, "Mind your manners, you are being watched."
There are other hardware stores, and I'll look there next time. If I want heartless, I'll order online and have it delivered to me. I'm not fond of that decision either. It doesn't make me feel good that they have us participating in our own obsolescence. What can we do to change this trend? It feels like it's going to happen no matter what.
