[img]139|left|Jessica Gadsden||no_popup[/img]Here we go again.
I’m old enough to remember when someone else came to your car and pumped gas. My mom, or grandma and I, would sit in the car and a guy (it was always a guy) in all white or denim blue coveralls would “fill ‘er up,” check your oil, maybe add water to your battery, wipe your windows and send you on your way.
When self-service gas appeared in the early eighties, I never thought it would catch on. I couldn’t imagine my mother in her perpetual high heels, putting the nozzle on her tank or checking her own dipstick. Or the banksters in Manhattan filling their own tanks. But slowly and surely it happened.
I tried to hold out. I would pay the extra pennies a gallon for full service. I’d purposely drive through New Jersey just to get my gas pumped for me. Eventually, even I had to give up on this one. Honestly, think about the last time you’ve seen a full service station. The one closest to my house closed, converted to all self-service two years ago. Full service is dead.
Self-banking seemed a little more reasonable to me. I remember hours upon hours standing in line for service at the Dime Savings Bank in downtown Brooklyn or even longer lines for access to service at my government-employed parents’ credit unions. My mother’s first Barney Card seemed a miracle. We could park the car, get money, and be on our way — no lines, no bad service involved. But I didn’t quite foresee having to pay for access to the same tellers who were once free.
Don’t Let Lack of Desire Affect You
Now, though, I think we’ve moved to the ridiculous. I was in CVS a few weeks ago buying batteries (the bane of the new parent). While standing in line an employee comes out of nowhere and asks me if I want to use the self-checkout. As I was the only person in line, I was wondering why I should bother, and said the same to her. The employee insisted that it was easy, that she’d even do it for me.
So this woman, who to my thinking could have been more helpful behind a real cash register, proceeds to scan my items, run my credit card, and hand them back to me. You should use this the next time you come in, she tells me. Do it myself? Was she kidding? Was there a discount for my self-service? I didn’t think I’d see “self-checkout” again. I was sure it was some Ventura Boulevard mini-mall anomaly. Boy, was I wrong.
The Friday before Halloween my dear husband turns to me to say he has a craving for coffee ice cream. After a debate about the best ice-cream stores versus my almost empty gas tank – we compromise on Ralphs for that pint of ice cream. With a crush of Halloween partygoers loading up on alcohol, there was quite a line – and of course, only two cashiers open. The harried cashier in my line yells to those of us in the back – there’s a new self-checkout – why don’t we use that?
I crane my head, and sure enough. There’s a corner of the store now dedicated to the do-it-yourself grocery shopper. Another employee, a la my CVS experience, tries valiantly to push the man behind me — with a full cart — toward the self-service line – where dozens of shoppers were already queued up. He balks mightily and starts yelling that at Ralphs’ exorbitant prices he expects some kind of service, the cashier-scanning- money-collecting-plastic- bagging kind. Most everyone glances away at the ruckus he creates. His expression may have been inartful, but he had a point.
As it is, I have to do far too much on my own. I’m not an expert in pumping gas, or banking, or travel planning — yet I’m forced to do it on my own. Even the clerk at the Post Office tried to steer me to weigh and mail my own packages. (A cute idea, but I got lost with the cubic inch measurement input requirement).
I Am Willing to Pay Extra
With some things, though, I’ve had it. The elimination of travel agents was supposed to be a huge savings for travelers. In theory, our costs could decrease by a big percentage if we would just book our own plane tickets, find our own hotels and hire our own guides. But it’s the worst part of traveling for me. While I admit banking or filling up my gas tank may not require any particular expertise, planning travel does.
I remember the advice you would get from travel agents as priceless. They’d flown this airline or stayed at that resort, and hey could give you the down and dirty while booking your trip, taking your payment, and giving you your tickets on the way out the door. Now we’re supposed to do-it-ourselves. It’s not that simple. Comparing airline fares should be easy — except many airlines opt out of the big websites — so you have to check three or four sites to get the best fares, which may change at any moment. Sure there’s a site for that, too — to forecast when it’s best to buy tickets. It is more time spent planning, not relaxing.
Want to know if that hotel, bed-and-breakfast or resort is any good? There’s a site for that, too. What my family used to do in an afternoon with a local trusted travel agent now takes several days, a case of carpal tunnel, and a few glasses of wine just to gather the best intelligence from people I know not at all. This year, I skipped most of this self-service nonsense and paid the ninety-six dollars to have someone do it for me. It was well worth it. She worried about getting seats together, the lowest fares, and arranging for a baby bassinet. I just arrived at the airport and boarded the plane. It was as if I’d started my vacation before I really started my vacation.
At least when the self-service travel, banking, and gas came along, there was the semi-plausible marketing claim that we would save money. But the self-service checkout doesn’t even purport to make this claim. In my no-television, limited media world I may be missing the message. I can’t imagine how they’re going to sell this one to people. But sell it, they will. We do almost everything else ourselves. Why not pay for and bag our groceries and personal care items?
We’re constantly being told that ours is shifting to a service economy. Yet, the irony of the lack of service is lost on most. The people who are to provide that service seem to be missing in action. Corporations are trying their darnedest to eliminate the “service” from the economy by cutting the humans who provide the service out of the process as quickly as possible – or else outsource it to a country paying slave wages.
If retailers could find a way to pay some Indian or Chinese person $100 a month to pump our gas or ring up our purchases without flouting minimum wage laws, they surely would. As some jobs are impossible to outsource, why not eliminate them altogether?
Unfortunately, I foresee a future where I do-it-myself from sunup to sundown. Corporations won’t provide someone to do it. Our smaller cash-starved government can’t do it. Americans are known for our can-do attitude, but must we do everything? If we do it all ourselves, who will be left to have that job that provides those wages to buy it and bag it?
Jessica Gadsden has been controversial since the day she discovered her inner soapbox. She excoriated the cheerleaders on the editorial page of her high school paper, transferred from a co-educational university to a women's college to protest the gender-biased curfew policy, published a newspaper in law school that raked the dean over the coals with (among other things) the headline, “Law School Supports Drug Use”—and that was before she got serious about speaking out. Progressive doesn't begin to define her political views. A reformed lawyer, she is a fulltime novelist who writes under a pseudonym, of course. A Brooklyn native, she divided her college years between Hampton University and Smith.
Ms. Gadsden’s essays appear every other Tuesday. She may be contacted at www.pennermag.com
