MYOB

Minding your own business was, not too long ago, a favorable behavior.  No one wanted you judging or advising or trying to do their job for them.  Now the opposite is true, at least the part about doing someone else’s job.  Now we are encouraged, sometimes even required to do many jobs we haven’t been trained for and don’t get paid for.

The other day when I was grocery shopping I found myself in line for one of four self-service checkout lanes, patiently waiting for the person ahead of me to scan her groceries, bag her groceries and pay the computer.  Soon it was my turn to do the same.  Those four lanes plus four self-service express lanes were overseen by two store clerks in case the computer got grumpy, a customer was puzzled or someone forgot to scan an item.  The experience at big box hardware stores is often the same.  They hire one person instead of four and let the customer do the work.

This is a far cry from the grocery stores at the turn of the last century when customers stood behind a counter and passed their orders through to a clerk, who would pick items off the shelves in back.  And Amazon Go plans to take it a step further, where the “checkout-free shopping experience is made possible by the same types of technologies used in self-driving cars: computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning.”  Just fill your cart and leave.  The computer knows who you are, what you bought and where to charge it.

The same is true when calling customer service or trying to work out a problem on line.  The typical phone call begins with a question about choosing a language.  Then you must “listen carefully as our menu has recently changed.”  After you have categorized your problem according to their definitions and pressed the appropriate buttons, you find out your position in the waiting line and must to listen to music and/or advertising about how important your business is to them.  As the wait goes on the computerized voice may remind you that you can always research your problem at their website.  At the end of the call you may be lucky enough to take a survey on how well you were treated either by pressing more buttons or speaking your answers so the computerized voice can tally and report your opinion and thank you for your time.

Suppose you lose patience and decide to try the on-line route.  I recently went to the Microsoft website with a question and was exposed to a robotic chat partner.  It presented me with categories and subcategories only to find that the problem was not one they anticipated, so I was given the option to sign on to a waiting line by filling out a form and requesting a return phone call.  While waiting for the call, I figured out the problem.  When the phone rang, I pressed the number to cancel the call.  Two minutes later the phone rang again.  I once again pressed the number to cancel the call.  When the phone rang a third time, I pressed the number to speak to a human.  I spent a full eight minutes on the phone with talking to a person trying to get their computer to stop calling – a problem they created (presumably because they care so much about my business).

It’s the same in banking.  This article from last spring tells of banks replacing tellers with ATMs and other automation delegating the work to customers.  In the Washington, D.C. region teller jobs have “dropped by nearly half in the past 10 years,” faster than the 17 percent drop nationally, with the expectation of losing another 30 percent by 2025.   It has become common for banks to charge a fee for not going paperless, requiring them to mail a monthly statement instead of customers going on line to retrieve their own statements from the website.

Many other industries are adopting this philosophy of virtual customer interactions or have been phasing it in for a long time.  When is the last time you have used a travel agent to book an airline or motel?  A new restaurant in San Francisco, called Eatsa, requires zero human interaction.  A Business Insider piece describes how cashiers’ work has been completely outsourced to customers.

As more and more laborsaving devices arrive on the scene, we have less and less time.  Everyone is rushed, and computers that were supposed to make our lives easier, following in the footsteps of indoor plumbing, vacuum cleaners and microwaves before them, just seem to be adding to the frenetic pace of life.