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It all started with gas pumps.
Without warning (to me), suddenly in the 70s, when I parked my car at a gas station, a friendly attendant was no longer trotting up to my window to ask, “Regular or ethel?” In order to stabilize the rapid rise in gas prices, the post was abolished.
OK, I got used to pumping my own gas. Now my challenge is the automatic checkouts in grocery stores. They ask the question: what happened to customer service?
These days, stores offer a maximum of self-service checkouts and a minimum of live cashiers. I guess stores save money by replacing clerks with automation, with the savings being passed on to customers. But is it true? And is it worth it?
I usually avoid automatic checkouts even when the live checker has a long queue. I look at this employee and I say to myself: “This is a person who has a job. I want to support him. It may cost me a little more, but if it is the cost of full employment, I consider it a worthwhile investment on my part.
More importantly, I object to the way that consumers in many areas are increasingly expected to do more work and get less service.
Take the travel industry. What happened to those wonderful, knowledgeable agents who would plan your trip for you and give advice based on their personal experience? Now we are all supposed to become our own online travel brokers.
And every business seems to have an automated phone tree that forces me to say or press answers to a series of questions often unrelated to my query. It is far too difficult to reach a person, even though this is where a call will invariably end.
But back to automated checkouts. Without training, customers must know how to scan fruit without a barcode, how to pay, and where to place the bags.
Some shoppers value human interaction with cashiers, but whether that is important to you or not, checkers are always efficient. Shouldn’t we be insulted that stores are reducing the number of people who have been trained to provide services?
Department stores and department stores have kept the personal touch, but large grocery stores and drugstores aim to train all of us to become effective cogs in the business process.
My brother-in-law in the early ’80s says he always checks himself out, not finding it difficult at all – but then he loves technology and was a chemist by trade. His goal is to get in and out as quickly as possible, which means he’s self-checking, he said. My sister, on the other hand, has no control over the process and chooses the live cashiers.
I remember shopping for groceries with my mom when she was older; she lived to be 94 years old. The checkout process even confused her with a patient cashier behind the counter and me by her side. What will happen to the aging population with increasing automation? Guess that’s why there’s still a full service gas station just outside the Rossmoor Seniors Community in Walnut Creek.
The day will come when our errands will be automatically totaled as we place them in the cart and we will be billed upon exit. It would be customer service at its best. But this intermediate step is annoying.
thanks for your advice
Marty Katz from Pleasanton replied to my column on stays and suggests day trips to Murphys in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the tall trees of Calaveras. And he recommends the Butterfly Sanctuary in Santa Cruz, as well as Laughing Sal on the boardwalk. He also enjoys stepping back in time to the historic Old Sacramento Waterfront and its California State Railroad Museum.
Katz has been to Bodega Bay more recently than I have and reports that the film school “The Birds” is now a private residence, but visitors are allowed to roam around. The Bodega Harbor Inn, where Alfred Hitchcock stayed during filming, Katz said, has DVD players in every room and when visitors check in they are given a copy of “The Birds” to watch. Amusing!
Editor’s Note: Dolores Fox Ciardelli is the Tri-Valley Life Editor for Pleasanton Weekly. Her column, “Valley Views,” appears on the second and fourth Friday of each month.
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