Major K.
7th November 2015, 01:37
Don't know which category I should post this in, but hopefully it fits here.
Today I learned that Walmart is piloting in two of its US stores a new method of checking out (aka, paying for your items).
"Suprisingly", it seems like bad news for workers.
I learned about this first hand, as I live near one of those stores and got in a conversation with a guy who is one of the few long-term employees there (extremely high turn-over rate for workers) -- a manager who seemed to have taken it upon himself to sell the idea to the public.
Basically, they took the self checkout method to the next level. Now they have scanner guns that you put on your cart if you want, and then customers can scan each item they want as they walk around the store and it rings it up right there. You even bag them as you put them in your cart (terrible, but an impressive and somewhat subtle way of getting people to buy more by opting in while in the rows).
When customers are done, they go to one of those self-checkout areas, plug in their portable scanning device, and then it tells you what you owe and you put your card in the machine to pay.
I've been thinking a bit about the implications of this today. It's clear the direction we're going: max automation from the farm to the dinner table, from the factory to the streets to the dump. It sounds great in some ways, but it isn't made for the benefit or liberation of "the consumer", but to reinforce the power elite's causa sui project.
In the shorter term, if this strategy is successfully phased in on a large scale, Walmart stores probably won't need many employees at all to function, besides perhaps one or two technicians to help keep things running smoothly.
This direction towards total automation got me thinking about human's role in this corporate dreamland, and I think it'd be that of the ultimate consumer, where labor and consumption become categorized as one and the same experience. Automation of production as much as possible coupled with a lock-down on human individuality (tight norms regulated with drugs, propaganda, etc.). If there are no workers, and only consumers, and then some "abnormal", "unhealthy" folk (to be labeled "terrorists" or dissidents, who need to be brought into the fold or pay the consequences) who don't bend to that paradigm, prospects for workers going on strike, let alone rebelling, look... not so great, at least from a 20th century "workers of the world unite" perspective.
What do you guys think of all this? At the very least, I think it shows some concrete tactics big corporations like Walmart are testing out these days, showing more of what their deprived vision for what the future of society should look like.
Major K.
Today I learned that Walmart is piloting in two of its US stores a new method of checking out (aka, paying for your items).
"Suprisingly", it seems like bad news for workers.
I learned about this first hand, as I live near one of those stores and got in a conversation with a guy who is one of the few long-term employees there (extremely high turn-over rate for workers) -- a manager who seemed to have taken it upon himself to sell the idea to the public.
Basically, they took the self checkout method to the next level. Now they have scanner guns that you put on your cart if you want, and then customers can scan each item they want as they walk around the store and it rings it up right there. You even bag them as you put them in your cart (terrible, but an impressive and somewhat subtle way of getting people to buy more by opting in while in the rows).
When customers are done, they go to one of those self-checkout areas, plug in their portable scanning device, and then it tells you what you owe and you put your card in the machine to pay.
I've been thinking a bit about the implications of this today. It's clear the direction we're going: max automation from the farm to the dinner table, from the factory to the streets to the dump. It sounds great in some ways, but it isn't made for the benefit or liberation of "the consumer", but to reinforce the power elite's causa sui project.
In the shorter term, if this strategy is successfully phased in on a large scale, Walmart stores probably won't need many employees at all to function, besides perhaps one or two technicians to help keep things running smoothly.
This direction towards total automation got me thinking about human's role in this corporate dreamland, and I think it'd be that of the ultimate consumer, where labor and consumption become categorized as one and the same experience. Automation of production as much as possible coupled with a lock-down on human individuality (tight norms regulated with drugs, propaganda, etc.). If there are no workers, and only consumers, and then some "abnormal", "unhealthy" folk (to be labeled "terrorists" or dissidents, who need to be brought into the fold or pay the consequences) who don't bend to that paradigm, prospects for workers going on strike, let alone rebelling, look... not so great, at least from a 20th century "workers of the world unite" perspective.
What do you guys think of all this? At the very least, I think it shows some concrete tactics big corporations like Walmart are testing out these days, showing more of what their deprived vision for what the future of society should look like.
Major K.