January 7, 2009

So I'm a little late...

The wife and I went to the grocery store tonight. Not exactly blogworthy material right? Wrong. Our local Giant has instituted a really interesting "scan as you go system". When you enter, you pick up a scanner and as you pick something up, you scan it, throw it in a bag in your cart and move on. When you are finished you go to the register, scan one more bar code, pay and you're done. Seems really cool, it makes the whole check out experience much quicker. My concern is this, the system is dependent on the honesty of people. This is really scary to me, because we all know that people in general aren't honest. The new system just seems to make it too easy to slip and extra "whatever" in your bag. Who knows, maybe Giant has a system that monitors this stuff. I'm sure they will cancel it if they start taking big losses due to theft. For now, its a cool new wrinkle to the trip to the store. Oh yeah, it also makes me glad I'm not a cashier. Consider our trip, we used the scanner and the self checkout. We interacted with zero store employees. That could be bad news for your friendly check out clerk. This is all just further proof that we are moving towards a fully automated society with little to no person to person interaction. Sounds fun 'eh.

Dinner is ready...talk to you soon.

1 comment:

  1. You city folk....

    We have been enjoying that system out here in the country for several years now. :-) Guess they find us folk a little more trustworthy.

    Oh... Scott... Don't be a Luddite. Technology isn't bad. Think of all the jobs that are created to make that scanning system work. Maybe you can find a job in the industry and get away from your "wonderful" co-worker.

    ReplyDelete