craigmcn

I did a full grocery shop last week and never spoke to a single employee. I scanned, bagged and paid entirely on my own, standing at a kiosk that used to be someone’s job. The store calls this convenience. I call it a job that got quietly handed to me, unpaid, dressed up as a favour.

Grocery stores are just the most obvious version. Airlines used to have a person check you in, tag your bag and print your boarding pass; now you do all three yourself at a kiosk, sometimes on your phone before you’ve even left the house, while the fare stays exactly the same. Restaurants have started doing it too: scan a QR code, read the menu on a four-inch screen, type in your own order and pay before the food shows up, tip prompt included, for a service nobody actually performed.

None of this labour transfer comes back to the customer as savings. If self-checkout genuinely cut costs, the self-checkout lane should be cheaper than the staffed one. It never is. The savings stay with the company and the customer just works for free. Increasingly it isn’t even framed as a choice: one staffed till and eight kiosks isn’t an option, it’s a queue you’re being pushed out of.

There’s actually a term for this, coined decades before self-checkout existed: shadow work, the unpaid labour companies get customers to do instead of employees. Self-checkout didn’t invent the outsourcing of work onto customers, it just made it visible, one scanner beep at a time. I’m not against efficiency. I’m against being asked to do someone else’s job and thanked for it like I did myself a favour.