Self-Service Today
Striding into the airport here one recent afternoon, Kimberly Ward did not so much as glance at the two ticket agents waiting at the counter.
INDIANAPOLIS - Striding into the airport here one recent afternoon, Kimberly Ward did not so much as glance at the two ticket agents waiting at the counter. Like most of her fellow travelers, she instead claimed an automated check-in terminal, touched its screen a few times, and took the proferred boarding pass with a quick smile of thanks. Ms. Ward, 37, pays for gas only at the pump. She shops at Marsh, a supermarket in her neighborhood that has machines that let customers scan, bag and pay for groceries themselves. Her favorite bank teller is her A.T.M.
Dealing with humans in such situations "just slows you down," she says. "This is a lot more convenient." A new generation of self-service machines is slipping into the daily lives of many Americans. Rejected for decades as too complicated, the machines are being embraced by a public whose faith in technology has grown as its satisfaction with more traditional forms of customer service has diminished. Faced with the alternative - live people - it seems that many consumers now prefer the machines.
"The main thing is you don't want to deal with the cashiers and their attitudes," said Dexter Thomas, 37, bagging his own pizza rolls and Eggos in a self-checkout lane at Pathmark store in downtown Brooklyn this month. "That's why people come to this line." Soon they may have little choice. Eager to save money on labor costs, businesses are stepping up the pace of automation. Nearly 13,000 self- checkout systems will have been installed in American retail stores like Kroger and Home Depot by the end of this year, more than double the number in 2001, according to the market research firm IDC. Delta Air Lines spent millions of dollars this year to line 81 airports with chest-high automated kiosks: 22 million of its passengers - 40 percent of the total - checked in by touch-screen this year, up from 350,000 in 2001.
Fast food restaurants like Jack in the Box and McDonald's are experimenting with automated ordering stations that executives say have reduced lines and the need to order from a human being. "Skiosks" dispense lift tickets at several Colorado ski resorts. Urged on by theater advertising, millions of moviegoers now buy tickets from one computer by phone and pluck them from another at the theater, though eye contact is sometimes still necessary to gain admission.
The sudden influx of the machines, which still look and sound like the souped-up PC's that they mostly are, heralds what economists see as the eventual roboticization of large chunks of the service sector. In a standard economic paradox, they are already beginning to both eliminate jobs and increase productivity.
But their arrival is also prompting a retooling of people's reliance on machines, and each other. Celebrated for their convenience, the devices appeal to an antisocial impulse that critics find troubling.
"The question we should be talking about is not how much faster do you get your chicken if you go through a kiosk," said Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who studies human interactions with digital devices. "The question is, `What is it doing to our social world when we deploy this technology to all these parts of the life cycle?' "
For many Americans, however, chicken check-out speed turns out to be quite the burning question. Marcia Boone, 62, said she has been using self check-out ever since it was installed in her local grocery store earlier this year. She has become so good at it that she sometimes chooses to go through the steps in Spanish, just for the challenge. "You eliminate a step," explains Mrs. Boone. "Even in our express lane with a regular checker, they run it through and then it's sitting on the counter, and then they bag it. Whereas I run it through and then I bag it right away."
A self-described "people person," Mrs. Boone, of Talleyville, Del., says she now talks back to the machine. "After you scan, if you don't put it into the bag fast enough, it will say. `Please put the item in the bag,' and I'll say, `I'm getting there, I'm getting there,' " she said. The growth of self-service machines, experts and users say, is partly a result of improvements in the technology since the early days of automated teller machines, which were much slower to catch on. Now more R2D2 than Darth Vader, most of today's kiosks have shed their hulking shells. Grubby number pads and monochrome displays have been replaced with brightly colored touch-screens that respond instantly - and help foster a trust in the technology that mere mortals may never again command.
"If we asked people even a few years ago which would be more likely to make a mistake, an A.T.M. or a cashier, they would say the A.T.M.," said Clifford Nass, a professor of communication at Stanford University. "Now people would say the cashier. That's an amazing change." But for many of those who declined to use similar technology in similar places when it was repeatedly tried over the last 20 years, the main appeal of the machines is the chance to avoid what they say are increasingly frequent frustrating, hostile or guilt-inducing interactions with service workers.
"They always get mad at me at Amtrak," said Megan Lesser, 26, of Brooklyn, who prefers to discuss schedules with Julie, the train company's voice-activated phone service, and buy her tickets at the electronic kiosks in Pennsylvania Station. "They say I have the wrong card, or if you go up to the window too fast, they're like, `You have to get back in line and wait until someone calls you.' "
Critics say the machines may also provide an all-too-easy escape from social interactions across class lines that may prompt some shoppers to wonder uncomfortably if a minimum-wage cashier has health insurance, or lead an employee to respond angrily to a customer. But some weary consumers say they would just prefer to serve themselves. Brian Southard, 30, of San Diego said employees at his local supermarket make him feel like it is an inconvenience for them when he shops there. He prefers kiosks at airports and was thrilled to find them installed recently at his Home Depot.
"I like people, but if someone's having a bad day and you get that wave of negativity, it can impact my day, too," said Mr. Southard. Machines have been displacing people since well before the Luddites began smashing them at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. But economists say this is the first time computers have been flexible enough to automate a broad range of skills, including cognitive ones, that previously required complex interaction with people.
"The types of jobs now amenable to displacement by technology is really something we haven't seen before, said David Autor, a labor economist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "If you don't have one of those jobs, you're a beneficiary, because the lines are shorter and your airline ticket price won't go up as fast. But it's going to have a significant impact on the people in these jobs now."
Businesses insist that they are not using machines as a direct substitute for human labor, but plan instead to compete by improving their service over all. But union representatives say jobs have already been lost as a direct result of the kiosks, and they say that the machines are causing perceptions of customer service to decline.
Airline employees say they often have to soothe passengers after a frustrating kiosk encounter. Twenty-five percent of the riders surveyed by New York City Transit recently said they had had a problem with the city's recently installed MetroCard machines, which now handle more than half of all sales.
Navigating a Delta kiosk for the first time at the Indianapolis airport, Cathie Franklin, 52, yearned for the days when someone else at least pretended to be happy to press the buttons for her. "I deal with computers all day at work," said Mrs. Franklin. "I don't want to have to deal with them when I'm traveling on vacation."
Many service employees are now being told to train people to use the technology that will ultimately replace them.
"The managers tell our people to tell customers to use those machines," said Bobby DePace, president of District 143 of the Machinists Union, which he said had already lost jobs at Northwest Airlines directly as a result of the kiosks. "If you don't tell them to use the machines, you're going to be disciplined."
Driving the corporate embrace of machines is some basic math. A typical airline kiosk costs less than $10,000, said Robert W. Mann Jr., an airline industry consultant in Port Washington, compared with a salary for a customer service agent of $20,000 to $40,000, plus benefits. Self- checkout systems pay for their $80,000 price tags after about 15 months, and then the average cost of a transaction to the retailer is cut nearly in half because of labor cost savings.
"Self-service machines never call in sick," said Greg Buzek, president of the IHL Consulting Group, a retail technology research firm. "You don't have to worry about scheduling issues. You don't have to worry about vacations." Then there are the things you do have to worry about. One morning this month, Luciano Guerreiro of Manhattan deposited a $100 bill in a machine at the 23rd Street C/E subway station for a $20 MetroCard, only to discover that it would not give him the change. The clerk in the booth listened sympathetically as Mr. Guerreiro explained at high volume what had happened. "I'm sorry," the clerk said, giving him a number to call. "Once you use the machine, I can't help you."
Posted by Craig at November 17, 2003 02:35 PM