2. They don't sell you cigarettes. Why not? Because they don't have arms or legs. They can't communicate like a human being, even if they do remember to ask whether you've 'swiped your Nectar card' before coughing and spitting out your change in an ejection of metallic phlegm.
3. They remove any remaining feeling of shame about buying condoms. People should be ashamed about buying condoms. When a man buys a packet of condoms he should feel like he is placing his immortal soul in jeopardy. He should feel like a man living life on the edge.
4. If we tolerate these machines taking the place of human beings even in small numbers, Sainsburys and Tescos and other stores owned by Sainsburys and Tescos will make moves towards sacking all their staff and replacing all their checkout staff with machines including the shelf-stackers. Can you imagine the cacophany of irritating, noisy machines? The warmth and humanity that we generally find in supermarkets would disappear overnight.
5. These machines could turn against us and start WWIII, just like in 'Terminator 3: The Rise of the Machines' starring Arnold Schwarzeneger, especially if, in future, food becomes more scarce and there are wars over food and spring mineral water, the Brecon Beacons becoming a potential nuclear flashpoint.
6. They are too loud. No human being talks that loud. They don't smile or have an 'off-day' when they just can't be arsed to be friendly. These machines make people aggressive and unnecessarily angry and I don't think it is just me who feels this way.
7. They break. I've seen them fail, only for a human being in an orange fleece have to come over with a key and start playing around with it like its some kind of vintage fruit machine. Human beings can be annoying, but, generally, are more interested in helping you and less likely to break than a machine and more reliable. Human beings may both die and fall critically ill, but rarely while serving you at the checkout.
8. If these self-checkout machines are allowed to continue, unemployment in the retail sector will double or treble. In general, the idea that robots and technology can cause an improvement in the lot of the working man and humanity in general is a huge utopian myth. If robots took over from all human work and endeavour, we wouldn't have street parties and distribute wealth around society. No, we'd sit at home watching Jeremy Kyle, on the dole, being hated by the robots who would regard us as a workshy underclass. If all the machines took over all human work, we would be bored, there would be more crime, more poverty, more unemployment and a proliferation of sin. In other words, the Devil makes work for idle hands.
9. The poor staff who are not machines have to listen to them all day. All day! They banned smoking in pubs partly to protect staff from smoke pollution. Now that noise has been upgraded to a pollutant, we should have mercy on them! It must be a living hell to have to work all day in those awful 'Express' shops installed for the sole purpose of knocking Mr Patel's corner shop out of business, listening to that self-checkout machine talking with that earnest, customer sales representative voice that in human terms does not exist. Nobody talks like that! Nobody!
10. They're not attractive. You cannot fancy them. They can't fancy you. There must be some people who have met their future wives/husbands at the checkout. The retail sector should be ashamed of itself for ever having introduced these things. We should, as a society, be ashamed that we ever tolerated the 'pilot schemes'. Ban them! What next?! All local buses being driven by remote control from a mega-computer grid in Luton?!
No comments:
Post a Comment