Hightower Lowdown

Oh, dandy. Another service
industry is “helping out”
us customers by eliminating
the clerks whose job it is to
help us out.
Thanks to the innovative
use of computer technologies,
banks and gas stations
have led the way to a
new service economy in
which the term .customer
service. has become an
oxymoron.
The latest innovator is
your friendly supermarket,
which will soon require you
to weigh your own groceries,
ring them up on a
scanner, bag them, and pay
for them through an automated
check-out system.
Kroger, Albertsons, A & P,
Safeway, Pathmark, Food
Lion and others are marching
down this high-tech,
low-touch path.
You’ll be glad to know
they.re doing this for your
convenience! The industry
notes that a big gripe customers
have is waiting in
long checkout lines. But
instead of hiring more
clerks, providing better training,
and paying a good
wage to retain helpful
employees, the industry’s
answer is to have you and
me do that work for them.
for free.
The supermarkets offer a
do-it-yourself checkout lane
but, first, they.re not
increasing the number of
lanes, so you’ll still face
long lines; second, computers
are always crashing, so
forget that efficiency claim;
and, third, how long before
they charge more for having
us do the work, like they did
with ATMs?
Drugstores, hardware
chains, even restaurants are
also looking forward to computerizing
their “service”.