Self-Checkout — Summary

Margaret buys the same seventeen items every week. The oatmeal is the brand she started buying when Harold’s doctor told him to watch his cholesterol. She keeps buying it because it is on the list and the list has its own momentum.

In aisle 7 she runs into Edie. They talk for twelve minutes near the canned tomatoes. Edie’s daughter is having another baby. Margaret knew the daughter when she was learning to walk. Twelve minutes nobody scheduled or designed, happening because two people were in the same aisle and recognized each other.

The store now offers three ways to get groceries: in person, pickup, delivery. Each is rational and voluntary. The aggregate is producing a stratification nobody designed. The delivery customers never enter the store. The pickup customers enter the parking lot. The in-store shoppers are who remain, a narrower cross-section than what was there five years ago when the aisle held everyone because everyone needed to eat.

The loyalty card knows the seventeen items. It knows the oatmeal brand Harold started buying in 2008. It does not know why she buys it. The system knows everything about what Margaret buys and nothing about who she is.

There used to be a cashier named Diane who worked register 3 for nine years, knew Margaret by name, set aside the decaf when stock ran low. This was not a company policy. It was Diane, doing something the job did not require because nine years of Tuesday transactions produced a knowledge that was not in any inventory system. Diane left four years ago. The register is now a self-checkout station.

Margaret has trouble with the scale. The bread is too light to register. A young employee scans his badge, presses a button, the screen clears. He does not know her name. She does not know his.