Industrial Espionage

I feel silly.  Whenever I start an entry I am prompted to enter my mood and what I am listening to.  The choice of moods is limited and I can't add one.  You would think that since this is a journal nostalgic and  reflective  would be options.  At least there is "silly".  Music?  I heard this tune in my car.  It reminded me of the Church, a group from the eighties.  I made sure to note the artist then I called myself to leave the band's name on my answering machine.  It would have been completely forgotten otherwise.

Subject?  Industrial Espionage.  Funny how the martial terms 'espionage' and 'sabotage' come from the French language.  The suffix 'age' is a French one.  Both terms denote acts of underhanded intelligence.  Are the French underhandedly intelligent?  Something to think about. 

  The Pavilion's in Burbank now provides self checkouts for customers who feel they can do the job better than the people trained to do it.  I took these two pictures using Maria's IPhone...I felt like James Bond but probably looked like Maxwell Smart.  I was curious as to how the machines worked and their efficiency so I had to use them.  I purchased a beer (I was going to buy a beer anyways) to see how the machine would 'check for id' (a good freudian reference would go well, but it might go over your head so I will explain that by id I mean identification).  The machine made no qualms about registering an alcoholic beverage.  I looked up to see that there was an employee overseeing the transactions of the four self-checkouts.  Obviously she had been alerted as to the fact that someone was buying beer at my terminal and she had 'allowed' it when she saw how old I look (stress 'look'). 

Buying beer at noon on a Saturday went smoothly at the Burbank Pavilion's self checkout.  But we returned for some substantial shopping on Sunday evening.  That was an entirely different situation.  The more people use the machines the more of a chance that there will be a snag.  There are things that the average customer has to learn when using the self-checkout.  Registering items that do not have bar codes like apples can be tricky.  How does one use coupons?  What form of payment am I using?  Etc, Etc, many things are happening when one buys groceries.  It was a busy time and every customer that ran into an issue made the wait in line that much longer.  A lot of the checkstand real-estate had gone into making room for the self-checkouts.  As the lines grew I wished the 4 self-checkouts would have remained 2 manned checkstands.  At least there would have been some movement.  The experience proved itself frustrating.

I am sure that this was just Pavilion's feeling some growing pains.  Our culture becomes more and more tech-savy as technology continues to pervade our reality.  It won't be long before the only snag at the self checkout will be the atm-challenged individual who has trouble using his atm card everywhere he (or she) goes. 

Will this make the human checker a thing of the past?  For the time being, I think it just a new option.  Did you get rid of your checking account when you got your debit card?