After spending time shopping the other day I feel like I live in a different realm: a place filled with beings that look like people but of vacuous minds. I’ll give you some examples to make you laugh at (or perhaps weep for) humanity, some remedies and finally explain the title.
Optimization
That is my impression of what the owners of retail stores are trying to achieve, revenue-wise. In decades past this was done by purchasing good products in bulk and selling them at a compelling price. These days it is shifting labor from employees to the customer to reduce payroll. This all started with barcode scanners to improve throughput. Then it advanced to the “convenience” of self-checkout stalls. Recently the stalls at Kroger-owned stores in AZ added a periodic “click click” sound between your scans. It took me a while to correlate it to the beeps I hear on UPS trucks when they are parked to make deliveries: its the tick-tock of the clock. Because hey, time is money so get your tail in gear so we can process the customer behind you!
The Stage
Before you continue please listen to the following audio clip to set the mood.1
I stopped at JOANNE Fabric to look for some netting for a project. After wandering the aisles as an XY in a sea of XX I was lost. So I stopped to ask for help from a woman stocking the shelves. “I’d like to help you but I don’t have one of the… (makes vertical swiping motion with her finger).” She was of course referring to using a smartphone to access the company website to search for my netting – since her management had decided not to train her on where things actually are stocked in the store. I nodded and headed for the door like a Russian hypersonic missile.
My second stop was a Home Goods. A kindly woman patiently led me around to find three out of three of my requests. The customer service there was straight out of the 1990s and didn’t involve a single line of software.
Home Depot: guy couldn’t find me a galvanized pail without the dang smartphone. Ultimately we were standing 15 feet away from them in the garden aisle, outside.
Last stop – and the Waterloo Crossing of Big Tech – the local supermarket chain: H-E-B (which is as much Texas as a 60oz steak with three baked potatoes for free if you can eat it all within 2 hours).
The Nemesis of H-E-B
That’s right: a tea light candle. I asked a kid working there where I could find some and he pulled out his pocket supercomputer. “This?” he asked me, pointing at the screen:
This is a perfect example of why computers do just what you ask them and not what you want them to. (It reminds me of the story from Asimov’s I, Robot series of short stories where a human tells a robot to “get lost” and it promptly does.) I said “No dude, its a candle.”
The Antihero
This guy:
It has reduced much of humanity to the unthinking. How many people do you know who can:
Perform long division on paper
Use a paper map (and own some)
Write a letter with a pen
Play an instrument
Estimate the time of day
Loan you a paper book to read
The smartphone is turning us into reference librarians instead of improving our abilities. Yet we think we are advancing!
The Title
C.M. Kornbluth wrote a short book in 1959 with that title. It was about a man being medically revived into a future where people thought they were doing amazing things – real apogee of humanity stuff – yet in fact, the world around them had been architected to fool them into thinking just that. Their cars seemed to be going 200 mph but really were doing 30 with special effects tossed in. It was the Nanny State of safety and comfort.
With a self-reliant mindset we should resist the continual barrage of creature comforts if they replace skills that diminish without use. I am not suggesting to keep using a shovel when a backhoe on a tractor is available, just don’t give away your shovel.
Perhaps take this facet of a mindset into the week with you. I sure am.
Dan
What he has tied with his foot, others cannot untie with their hands. Tamil proverb #1804
This is the opening of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship” from Scheherazade, BTW.