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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| From a source I don't think I've linked before, The Nation gives us this day our daily gloom. Automation in Retail Is Even Worse Than You Thought  New technology is not just making shopping more challenging for workers and consumers—it’s poised to rip off the most vulnerable. Naturally, the first thing I thought of when I saw the headline was the vile abomination known as "self-checkout," which forces us to do their job for free while treating every customer as a potential thief. Brianna Bagley’s favorite hobby is playing Horizon Zero Dawn, a role-playing game featuring a young hunter who battles murderous robotic organisms on a postapocalyptic planet overrun by machines. While I've never played HZD, the phrase "robotic organisms" is an actual oxymoron, not a funny one like "military intelligence" or "honest politician." When she isn’t leveling up in the game, Bagley is hard at work in the produce department of a chain supermarket in Salt Lake City, Utah. "Work hard, and you'll succeed in life!" I also can't resist wondering if, with her name, she started out as a bagger, back when baggers existed. During the pandemic, Bagley earned about $15 per hour in a supermarket e-commerce department dedicated to filling online orders and preparing them for delivery. "Work hard, and you'll succeed in life!" Bagley’s experience is of a piece with the broader trend in retail toward automation and other technological shortcuts. Technology was supposed to make life better for all of us, not just the rich. Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and 13 colleagues wrote to the CEO of the supermarket behemoth Kroger in November about electronic price tags (often called electronic shelf labels or ESLs). These digital displays allow companies to change prices automatically from a mobile app. Tlaib warned that this so-called “dynamic pricing” permits retailers to adjust prices based on their whims. This is not much different from when gas stations switched to digital signs, though. Used to be, if you owned a gas station and wanted to change the prices on the sign, you'd have to go out and climb up on a ladder. Or, rather, make your hard-working minimum-wage employee do it. Then you'd have to change the price on each pump. Now? The whole thing's automated, and the hard-working minimum-wage employee can do it from a terminal or something, without leaving the checkout desk. And they (the owners, not the wage slaves) can do it on a whim. The difference is, everyone needs food. Just as Uber raises prices during storms or rush hour, retailers like Kroger use ESLs to adjust prices based on factors like time of day or the weather. "Snow tomorrow! Double the prices on bread and milk!" “My concern is that these tools will be abused in the pursuit of profit, surging prices on essential goods in areas with fewer and fewer grocery stores,” Tlaib wrote. Though, despite my worker-centric position, I'm not opposed to profit. I just want more of it to go to the people who actually do the work. Warren and Casey also voiced concern about Kroger’s partnership with Microsoft to install facial-recognition technology in stores, which could be used to identify individual customers: When a shopper approaches the shelf, she would see a price calibrated specifically for her. Leaving aside for a moment the huge gap between "could be" and "is," this is a very good reason to continue, or resume, wearing masks in grocery stores and other places with cameras. Retailers could use shopper data to charge higher prices to those who can afford to pay more, but since stores do not have to disclose who is making pricing decisions or why, the senators worry that shoppers on a budget are particularly vulnerable. There's a giant logical hole in their reasoning here. Unless the store also switches to the scan-as-you-go system, which some have tried but is even more prone to customer abuse than self-checkout, how do they coordinate the price on the shelves with the price that the individual customer pays at checkout? Say, for example, they set the price of a can of tuna at $1.49 for me and $1.99 for the next person. That's bad, sure, but then we go up to the checkout and, what, more facial recognition software at the cashier? That seems like a lot of computing power, and computers are known to break down at the slightest fart. This, of course, is not the same thing as surge pricing, which, as I've noted before, few have a problem with if the perspective is turned around: "We charge less for drinks during Happy Hour" is more palatable than "We charge more for drinks after 7pm," though the result is the same. Walmart plans to install the tags in 2,300 stores by 2026. The nation’s largest retailer emphasized the benefit to shoppers: “This efficiency means we can spend more time assisting customers.” No. This efficiency means we can hire fewer "associates," thus increasing the bottom line by the difference between the amortized cost of the system, plus any ongoing maintenance, and the wages they're no longer paying. The experiences of workers cast doubt on such claims. I spoke to William Knight, a 10-year veteran of the grocery industry who spends their off hours crafting cyberpunk stories inspired by the novel Neuromancer. (Knight’s latest is a dystopian tale about an America ruled by just three corporations.) I gotta say, I love the little personal bios here. I'm including this one because it's writing-related. Tom Geiger is the special projects director of Local 3000 in Washington. He told The Nation that employees at Fred Meyer (a chain owned by Kroger) have complained about electronic labels heating up stores. “These digital strips that relay this information, they literally emit heat that makes the stores warmer than it would be otherwise.” Geiger cited the negative impact to people and the planet. “I don’t know how much energy that is using. Wouldn’t you want shoppers and workers to be comfortable? And how much is it costing?” Maybe he needs a device to count the radiation... okay, no, I need to stop making fun of peoples' names. Seriously, though, that heat is classical entropy, and it is, from what I've heard, well-understood and quantifiable. It can also be balanced against the reduction in entropy caused by, for example, using LED lighting and more efficient refrigeration, as well as laying off more staff because humans are also a big source of entropy. Okay, so maybe not that seriously. But kind of. Automation may also have unintended social consequences. I gotta admit, I'm a little tired of hearing "unintended consequences." They always exist. They also result from continuing to do things the old way. Workers’ main fear is that jobs might disappear altogether. And that's a legitimate one because, like I said up there, automation doesn't usually help the employee. Instead of making the staff jobs less stressful, they just allow management to have fewer employees, all of whom have approximately the same level of stress, and pay, as before. Bagley draws another lesson from her favorite video game. In Horizon Zero Dawn, the hunter discovers that her own mother had a role in creating the technology that launched an apocalypse. Dammit! I hate spoilers! |
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