The big news in my small town has been
the new automated checkout line at the grocery store. You scan the
purchases yourself, and then give the machine your credit card,
with no need for any human interaction. At least that’s how
I’m told it works — I haven’t used the thing myself.
It’s a big change for a town like ours, where some
people still write checks for everything. Take my friend Chuck:
When he buys coffee in the morning, he writes a $3 check. When he
buys two beers of an evening, he writes a $10 check.
Chuck’s checks are an institution in town. Last November, the
bookkeeper for the restaurant where Chuck buys his coffee became
worried when those checks stopped coming across her desk. Was he
upset at them for some reason? Then one morning she saw him in
there buying coffee — it turned out he hadn’t missed a day,
but had been paying in cash!
Why does Chuck so love
checks? I’ve never asked him — it seems sort of personal,
plus I have more fun speculating. I’m suspecting it’s a
subtle form of advertising: recently a friend was wondering how to
describe Chuck’s business, which involves furniture.
“He does ‘custom woodworking,’” I responded.
“At least that’s what it says on his checks.”
Perhaps Chuck writes checks merely because he can. It’s a
small town. Everyone knows him. And writing lots and lots of checks
is an ancient small-town tradition, one that is not dying quickly.
I lived in the city in the 1980s, when already checks were becoming
outmoded. But when I moved to a small town in 1990, we had no
automated teller machine, so you couldn’t get cash when the
bank was closed. On a weekend, especially, you wrote a check and
got change in cash.
Here’s the funny thing, though:
Chuck, who’s just over 30, is too young to remember those
days. The ATM has always been part of his world. He just prefers a
world where he writes checks.
For 10 years I’ve
been passing an automated-teller in the bank’s lobby, on my
way to cash a check with Sharon or Roxy or Lola. I’ll say
good morning, chat about the weather, pick up a piece of candy from
the basket by the teller window.
But in the past few
months I have started using the ATM. Sharon and Roxy and Lola have
left the bank, and so the new tellers are strangers. What fun is
that? (I do still like to go in and grab a piece of candy before
heading back to the lobby to perform my humdrum interaction with a
machine.)
Presumably the same principle is at work at the
grocery store. I hardly ever see anyone using the automated grocery
checkout, and when I do I rarely recognize anyone. Out-of-towners,
they’ve never met Evie, and so feel no need to say hello to
her rather than handing a card to a machine.
I do
occasionally see the store’s employees at the auto-line.
Maybe they get to say hello to each other enough during their
shifts. Or maybe they’re just there to help. On a recent trip
I passed up the vacant auto-line to wait in a longer line for a
live check-out clerk. And while I was waiting, an employee was
paged to customer service. This used to mean that somebody was
needed to help a customer carry bags to the car. But now, the
responding employees look first to the auto-line. Another customer
needing rescue after being stymied by technology. More job security
for Evie.
I suppose, eventually, most of us will come to
accept the automated machines, as we’ve accepted ATMs and
even online banking. But we’ll probably do so a lot more
slowly than people in urban areas. We’re a little more
people-oriented, a little more opposed to what some might call
progress.
Last spring, a local variety show featured a
running gag about the automated grocery checkout. But the jokes,
which involved the disembodied voice of the machine issuing bizarre
instructions, didn’t work too well. Nobody in the audience
had used the machine enough to understand them.
John
Clayton is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News (hcn.org). He writes in Red Lodge,
Montana.
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