Running with Scissors

The way many retailers are embracing technology today reminds me of kids playing with their new toys. My first evidence is the fact that air travel today is using technology to replace people to the point it is beginning to resemble some form of Universal Torture with all the players competing for the title “Most Unfriendly Way to Fly.”

I recently had to travel to Miami and tried to book a ticket over the phone. I encountered the increasingly more popular ROBOATTENDENT. A computer with a voice recognition system that is doomed to send more people into a depression than the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

Computer: “And where would you like to fly to?”

Me: “Miami”

Computer: “I didn’t understand what you said, could you please repeat where you would like to fly to?”

Me: “Miami”

Computer: “I didn’t understand what you said, could you please spell it? Please say first letter.”

Me: “M”

Computer: “I didn’t understand what you said, could you please repeat first letter?”

Me: In a desperate attempt to escape from the roboattendent: “CUSTOMER SERVICE!”

Computer: “I didn’t understand what you said, could you please spell it? Please say first letter.”

It is not just happening with airlines, it is happening every where as all companies look for ways to use technology to replace people. Somehow it seems to me that the more businesses try to improve their ability to take our money from us the worse it gets for us. The roboattendent is just the tip of the iceberg.

Along with roboattendents come the new breed of money extracting technology “robocashiers.” These automated cashiers now are frustrating customers in supermarkets and hardware stores, but it is only a matter of time before they take over the entire retail sector and renders it “humanless” fulfilling the prophecies of “The Terminator” movie series.

As companies accelerate the pace at which they replace employees with machines, any savings in labor costs are offset by declining sales. All the business pundits blame the drop in retail sales the past couple of quarters on the drop in home sales and I think they are wrong.

It seems to me to be obvious why sales have fallen, or are stagnant for many retailers including Wal-Mart; you’ve fired all the people. It reminds me of an old protest poster from the sixties: “What if the had a war and nobody came?”

Since I make my living working with retailers, I wanted to see if this trend was going to be as big a threat to my income as it is to the cashier’s income. Over the weekend I went to a number of retailers to see for myself what impact the robocashiers were having on productivity. To start with, I went to Home Depot and as I walked in, I saw that there were long lines formed behind the human cashiers and all the lines at the robocashiers are empty.

Now this is where the robocashiers are costing them money. Once the lines at the cash registers get long, some of the customers heading to the checkouts took a look at the long lines and abandoned their full shopping arts in the aisles and left.

In the meantime the only people using the robocashiers at Home Depot are people with only a couple of items. So they spend God knows how much money on the technology, programming and training only help some rapidly purchase a gallon of flat white latex primer.

What makes this really funny is that Home Depot has a person stationed at the robocashiers to help customers use them. Why don’t they just open another register and put the “attendant” on it?

Watching the toys at work is one thing. Playing with them is another. So I took the plunge. After an hour of watching the trials and tribulations of the “early adopters” braving the robocashiers, I walked the aisles and picked up the necessary ingredients to build and Iguana cage with my son. The hinges scanned, and the box of screws scanned, but when I tried to scan a set of drill bits, the robocashier had a tantrum. It kept saying “please scan your next item” over and over again. I tried the vertical scanner; I tried the horizontal scanner to no avail. I was going to call the assistant, but she was busy trying to scan a shovel for another customer with the results I was getting.

So I lost hope and I left the items on the robocashier and went to True Value Hardware. They had no robocashiers, short lines moving fast, and all my business.

I next went into Albertson’s to see what effect the robos were having on productivity there and saw the same thing happening that happened at home depot; long lines behind the human cashiers, empty robo lines and a dedicated robo assistant standing there doing nothing but talking to the girl at the customer service desk.

Like anything new, it is going to take time until human customers are going to accept the inevitability of robocashiers, but in the meantime the learning curve is going to be brutal on the businesses that are the early adopters of the technology. I read a report in a magazine where supermarkets using robocashiers are reporting a 35% drop in impulse purchases.

What do they expect? They remove the cashiers in the name of cost cutting, and replace them with very expensive machines that work 24/7 and take no breaks, and don’t talk with customers causing a line to form, forcing those waiting in line to look at magazines and candy bars until they can’t resist the urge anymore.

I think the machines are having a worse effect on the businesses that invest in them that no one wants to talk about because of the amount of money spent. They are afraid that if they tell their bosses what is really happening in the stores, they will be replaced by roboexecutives. And since they won’t tell you what is really happening with the robocashiers on the store floors, I will.

The robocashiers are causing the businesses that install them to lose sales…for now. They are causing businesses to lose money because they humans are much slower to adapt to new technology than businesses are. It is a vicious cycle: companies make massive investments in techology to reduce operating expenses (number of employees) and the payback fails to meet projections. So the business has to cut expenses (number of humans) again so they invest in more technology causing the proliferation of robots to get worse.

I called my credit card company because there was an unfamiliar charge. But there was something different this time, when I pressed "O" instead of getting customer service I got “That is not a valid option. Please try again.”

My satellite service provider has taken over my credit card company (see An Eternity in Hell). The credit card company has become part of “Sky Net” the creator of the Terminators. They have terminated the human employees and replaced them with roboemployees. No matter what button I push I can’t reach a human, so I am cancelling my credit card. If they don’t want to give any work to humans, I don’t want to give them my money any more.

As businesses eliminate humans from the workplace in the pursuit of lower operating expense, how much longer before they eliminate humans altogether and just have the robots do business with each other? Think this question is far fetched look at the world of securities and how “electronic trading” has eliminated the most of the human element.

When the last employee is laid off, who is going to be left to buy?

I think the people who make investments in technology to save money need to inflect it on themselves first, before they inflict it on the public. If they don’t; they are in effect like kids running with scissors. Except the only thing they end up cutting is their bottom line.