Opinion: The accusation “unexpected item in the bagging area” is aggravating enough, but how long before this will be upgraded to “unwanted customer in the shopping area”?
Older customers may cheer that a steep rise in shoplifting worldwide is casting doubt on the value of retail automation, even as its ambit grows. But retailers may yet have to stick with it because of the change in attitudes and etiquette demanded by younger shoppers.
In many situations, automation lets petty theft go undetected, to the point where supermarkets in particular are considering whether reinstating checkout operators would be cheaper after all.
Older consumers, often lamenting the dwindling “personal” element, are also bridling at the acceleration of automation in hospitality. Diners are increasingly expected to download tabletop codes and send their orders by cellphone, paying at the same time.
Efficient, they concede, but impersonal. Yet a younger customer might fairly ask: how personal is a verbal exchange with a waiter or till operator anyway?
For many young adults, interactions with strangers are on a scale from discomfort to torture – an invasion of their precious headspace. Their parents and grandparents deplore and mock this as militantly elective introspection. But the young argue they’re unlikely to make a meaningful connection at a shop counter or cafe table, so the required niceties are hollow.
Neuroscience now tells us social interaction, including conversation, discernment, choices and restraint, uses up masses of energy and too much of it can deplete a person, especially an introvert. Scientists studying habit formation caution against too much conscious decision-making in any one day, as it can exhaust one’s faculties, leading to poor decisions.
By extension, the more chattipoos we feel obliged to engage in with strangers during perfunctory interactions, the more likely we might be later to binge on junk food or doom-scroll social media rather than making more beneficial choices.
The move to QR codes and AI-generated services is obviously a necessary commercial pitch to the preferences of coming generations. But in a wider sense, it’s a sign the human attention span is becoming prime commercial real estate in a new way. Consumers now demand the ability to safeguard it from low-value incursions.
This is especially tough for supermarkets, and not just because unscrupulous shoppers are pushing the “peanuts” option while the automated machine is weighing macadamias. There’s been an attitudinal shift towards active resentment since the pandemic- and geopolitics-wrought surge in the global cost of living.
Customers are much more likely to take price rises out on the retailer, according to recent research into the shoplifting epidemic. Even the well paid do it, seemingly oblivious to the fact it’s often blamed on staff and only adds further pressure for price hikes.
Shoplifters also disregard the fact that higher energy and freight costs and shortages of some groceries are beyond retailers’ control.
Admittedly, the mood of consumer utu has also been intensified by predatory business behaviour that can’t be blamed on global forces. These include surge pricing, where charges rise opportunistically according to peak demand, even though the brute economics suggest they should actually fall because costs per item or service are lowered.
Whatever your tolerance for exchanging pleasantries with strangers, the widespread replacement of many jobs by automation, drones and AI would remove one extremely useful sorting mechanism in the field of dating and general friendship selection: is the person courteous to staff?
Boorishness and hauteur towards waiting staff, taxi drivers, shop assistants and the like are as accurate an elimination signal about a potential hook-up as what’s on their bookshelf, their sense of humour, their politics – or even whether they cynically nick stuff they should pay for.
